by Kitty Kelley
The motives of Lord Mountbatten, or “Uncle Dickie,” as he was known to the family, were even more suspect. The Queen objected when he started addressing the issue of her elder daughter’s future husband. He first raised the subject when Princess Elizabeth was only thirteen years old; the Queen dismissed the discussion as premature, although her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, already had compiled a list of eligible young men to be considered. Her possibilities, all of royal blood, included Prince Charles of Luxembourg, who was considerably younger than Elizabeth, and Prince Gorm of Denmark.
Unfazed, Mountbatten persisted through the years by strategically placing his handsome nephew Prince Philip of Greece at various family affairs. He encouraged the young man, whom he treated as a surrogate son, to ingratiate himself with the King and Queen and to get to know Lilibet, who was his third cousin. Mountbatten suggested that Philip correspond with Elizabeth (“A card here, a note there, would be very nice, my boy”) during the war, so by the time Philip was eighteen, he, too, was seeing himself as a potential prince consort.
When he went to sea, Philip shocked his navy skipper by divulging his uncle’s scheme. Vice Admiral Harold Tom Baillie-Grohman was Captain of the battleship Ramillies in the Mediterranean during the summer of 1939. As a favor to Lord Louis Mountbatten, he had taken on board the midshipman known as Prince Philip of Greece. He told the young man, who was born in Greece to a German Danish father of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg and a German mother (Battenberg/Mountbatten), that he would not be able to advance in the Royal Navy as a Greek citizen. Philip understood and said that he wanted to become a naturalized British subject. He knew his career in the British navy would not progress if he didn’t give up his Greek nationality. Greece was then a neutral country, and England could not risk having even a distant heir to the Greek throne (Philip was sixth in the line of succession) killed by enemy action while serving on a British warship.
“Then came the surprise,” the Admiral wrote in his diary. “Prince Philip went on to say: ‘My Uncle Dickie has ideas for me; he thinks I could marry Princess Elizabeth.’ I was a bit taken aback and after a hesitation asked him: ‘Are you really fond of her?’
“ ‘Oh, yes, very,’ was the reply, and ‘I write to her every week.’ ”
The Admiral added to his diary entry in brackets: “I wrote this conversation down directly afterwards and so it is pretty correct.”
Two years later, in 1941, Philip, twenty years old, was still corresponding with the fifteen-year-old Princess. During a holiday visit in Cape Town, South Africa, his cousin Princess Alexandra of Greece saw the midshipman bent over his stationery. She asked to whom he was writing.
“Princess Elizabeth of England,” said Philip.
“But she is only a baby!”
“But perhaps I’m going to marry her.”
Alexandra was crestfallen. “I suspect I was a little in love with Philip myself,” she admitted years later. “In my teens, there was a prospect that I might marry him…. Our families discussed it.”
Philip had become the ward of relatives when his own family fell apart. His father, Prince Andrew, was the seventh child of George I of the Hellenes. His mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, was Alice the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord of England at the outbreak of World War I. His father was a professional soldier in the Greek army. When Turkey invaded Greece in 1922, Andrew was accused of treason for disobeying orders and abandoning his post under enemy fire. He was tried, convicted, and jailed. As he sat in prison facing possible execution by a firing squad, his wife appealed to her powerful British relatives to save her husband’s life. The King, George V, remembered what had happened to his Russian cousin (“dear Nicky”) and dispatched a ship to Greece to forcibly remove Andrew and his family. The Prince, accompanied by his wife, who was deaf, and their four daughters, boarded the HMS Calypso. He was carrying an orange crate that contained his only son, Philip, eighteen months old.
The platinum blond toddler had been born on a kitchen table on the Greek island of Corfu in a house, Mon Repos, with no electricity, no hot water, and no indoor plumbing. He learned sign language to communicate with his mother, who had turned deaf after catching German measles at the age of four. He also learned English, French, and German but did not speak a word of Greek. After being evacuated from Greece with his family, he spent nine years living outside Paris with his parents, who were royal but not rich. In disgraced exile, they lived in borrowed houses, wore shabby hand-me-downs, and accepted the charity of relatives and friends to feed, clothe, and educate their children.
Within nine months in 1930, Philip’s four older sisters, who had been educated in Germany, married German noblemen. One was an SS Colonel on Himmler’s personal staff, and the others were Princes who supported the Nazis during World War II. One sister, Sophie, named her eldest son Karl Adolf in honor of Adolf Hitler. With his four daughters securely married, Philip’s father abandoned his borrowed home to live on the yacht of his mistress in Monte Carlo, where he became addicted to the gaming tables. He left behind his ten-year-old son. His wife—Princess Andrew—collapsed. After the separation she suffered a nervous breakdown, which in retrospect appears to have been a traumatic menopause. No longer able to care for her young son, she was institutionalized in Switzerland.
She emerged a few years later, found religion, and established the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, an order of nuns who helped the sick and needy in Greece. During the war she sheltered Jewish families in Greece and was posthumously honored for heroism by Israel. Even though she had been married and borne five children, she dedicated herself to celibacy. For the rest of her days she wore a gray habit belted by a white cord and with a veil and wimple.
While Philip’s mother was incapacitated, his maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, stepped in to care for the ten-year-old boy, who was sent to England. She shared the responsibility for Philip with her eldest son, George, the Marquess of Milford Haven. His wife, Nada, who bathed her feet in champagne, was as exotic as Edwina Mountbatten. Both were rich, restless, and reputed to be sexually adventurous. During the 1934 custody trial for Gloria Vanderbilt in New York City, a maid testified to seeing evidence of a lesbian relationship between young Gloria’s mother and Nada. “She put her arms around Mrs. Vanderbilt and kissed her,” said the maid. The lurid testimony about “kissing on the lips” was not reported in the British newspapers because the Milford Havens were close to the British royal family and the press would not report anything that reflected negatively on the monarchy. That royal protection extended to Nada’s husband, George Milford Haven, who was bisexual and obsessed with pornography. According to his personal financial records, he spent more than $100,000 amassing a vast collection of albums of erotic photographs and sadomasochistic books dealing with incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and family orgies, where mother and son joined father and daughter in sexual relations. George invested a fortune in buying catalogs for artificial genitalia, aphrodisiacs, horsewhips, and instruments for self-flagellation. After his death, part of his pornography collection ended up in a private case in the British Museum. He was only forty-six when he died of cancer in 1938, and his task of looking after Philip fell to George’s younger brother, Lord Louis Mountbatten. “That’s when Uncle Dickie took over,” said Philip. “Before that no one thinks I ever had a father…. Most people think that Dickie’s my father, anyway.”
Within ten years Philip had attended four schools, all paid for by various relatives. One rich aunt financed his first two years at The Elms, a school for wealthy Americans in St. Cloud, near Paris. His British relatives paid for his next four years at the Old Tabor School, Cheam, in Surrey, one of England’s oldest, most traditional preparatory schools. Then his sisters decided he should be educated in Germany, so at the age of twelve—in 1933—he was enrolled in Schloss Salem in Baden, a school run by a brother-in-law. “Scholarship was not important when Philip and I were go
ing to school at Salem,” recalled actress Lilly Lessing. “The emphasis then was on courage, honesty, and taking care of people who were weaker than you… and Philip, who was very athletic, excelled even then. He was very much influenced by Dr. Kurt Hahn—we all were—but Dr. Hahn was Jewish, so he had to leave Germany. He sought refuge in Scotland, where he started Gordonstoun, and Philip followed him a year later.”
Kurt Hahn, who was described by some former students as “strong and dogmatic, probably a repressed homosexual,” ran an experimental school that became the forerunner for Outward Bound. All discussion of sex was forbidden at Hahn’s school, where the military curriculum included a rigorous regime of exhausting exercise, two icy showers a day, and bracing hikes before breakfast. Philip, who became one of Hahn’s most devoted followers, thrived at Gordonstoun, earning good grades and excelling at sports. He became captain of the cricket and hockey teams.
In his five years at Gordonstoun, his family never visited him once, and without a home of his own, he was shuffled off to relatives for holidays. He received some spending money from one of his uncles, the Crown Prince of Sweden, but it was never enough to cover all his expenses. Frequently he had to borrow clothes from his friends, who remember scrambling to find him a suit, cuff links, and collar studs so that he could be dressed properly for the wedding of his cousin Marina to the Duke of Kent.
After graduation from Gordonstoun, Philip wanted to join the Royal Air Force and become a fighter pilot. But his uncle Dickie steered him into the navy, saying it was the only branch of military service acceptable to the aristocracy. “The RAF is for the working class…. All of our best kings have served in the Royal Navy,” said Mountbatten. “I firmly believe that a naval training is the best possible training for royal duties.” So Philip enrolled in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
He was quite candid about why when he met the political diarist Sir Henry (“Chips”) Channon. While visiting his mother in Athens, Philip spoke openly to Channon about his reasons for not becoming a fighter pilot, and Channon recorded the conversation on January 21, 1941: “I went to an enjoyable Greek cocktail party. Philip of Greece was there. He is extraordinarily handsome. He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy.”
By then the young midshipman knew his life’s direction and was steering himself toward an arranged marriage to the future Queen of England. Yet three years before, he had fallen in love with the most photographed girl in the world. Her name was Cobina Wright Jr., and Philip was bewitched. He met her in Venice during a holiday visit to his aunt Aspasia, the widow of King Alexander of Greece.
Philip had grown up around royalty—in addition to his uncle the Crown Prince of Sweden, another uncle was the exiled King of Greece, who was married to Princess Marie Bonaparte. She had once been the lover of the Prime Minister of France and later a disciple and patroness of Sigmund Freud. Philip’s cousin Princess Alexandra married the King of Yugoslavia, and his favorite cousin, Princess Frederika, granddaughter of the Kaiser and a former Hitler Youth member, became Queen of Greece. As a child Philip had spent time at Kensington Palace in London, the royal palaces of Bucharest and Sinaia, and the royal residence in Transylvania, visiting his cousin Prince Michael of Rumania. He called Queen Marie of Rumania “Aunt Missie.” He also visited another aunt, Queen Sophie of Greece, who was the Kaiser’s sister.
Accustomed to White Russians with gray teeth and European royals with high cheekbones, Philip had never experienced the dazzling megawatt glamour of American movie stars. Cobina Wright Jr. was all of that and more. She was Hollywood and high society, which was America’s version of royalty. A spellbinding blond beauty, she had appeared on the covers of Life and Ladies’ Home Journal as part of the Brenda Frazier debutante set. “That was when society really mattered,” said her mother, Cobina Wright Sr., a society columnist for the Hearst newspapers and a social mountaineer on the level of Philip’s uncle Dickie.
“My little Cobina was more than just a mere starlet,” she said. “After all, her father—my former husband—was a multimillionaire who was in the Social Register.” Following a nasty public divorce, Cobina Sr. lost her lofty listing in the Social Register. Without her husband’s money she was forced to earn a living, which she did by collecting the celebrities of her day—generals, politicians, movie stars, and those she breathlessly described as “the crème de la crème of society.”
“Mother was—well, so boisterous, so aggressive, always striving so hard to get to know the most famous, the most important people, that it used to embarrass me,” her daughter said.
An enterprising stage mother, Cobina Wright Sr. was grooming “little Cobina” for a career in the movies to be capped by an illustrious marriage. “Certainly, Cobina is the ‘most’ girl,” she said in 1938. “Most photographed, most publicized, most sought after.” By then her promotions had persuaded press agents to dub her eighteen-year-old daughter as “Miss Manhattan of the New York World’s Fair,” “the Best Dressed New York Supper Club Hostess,” and “the Most Beautiful Girl in Palm Beach.” She also made sure her daughter was described as “the darling of high society.”
At the time Cobina Jr. met Prince Philip, she was singing in nightclubs, modeling for John Robert Powers, and working under contract to 20th Century– Fox, along with Linda Darnell and Gene Tierney, later the sultry lover of John F. Kennedy and future wife of Oleg Cassini.
Philip was attracted the minute he saw the stunning young woman sitting in Harry’s Bar in Venice with her mother and an Italian Countess. He was struck by her blinding good looks. She had none of the stony haughtiness of his royal European female cousins and looked more beguiling than the snooty young women of the aristocracy who were pursuing him so aggressively. This young woman combined the sunny insouciance of California beaches with the sleek sophistication of Manhattan nightclubs. Blond, lithe, and graceful, she was as bright and shiny as a new American penny. Her long, lean, leggy beauty matched his own. He immediately left his cousin, Princess Alexandra, and strode across the room to Cobina’s table, where he nonchalantly accepted the curtsies of the two older women, who jumped up as he approached. They had recognized him at once and were enthralled to be in his presence. Young Cobina did not know who he was, but she stood up anyway and started to curtsy like her mother. Philip quickly extended his foot as if to trip her.
“Don’t you dare,” he said. “I’m just a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction. My name is Philip of Greece.”
“Just Philip of Greece? No last name?” she asked.
“Just Philip of Greece,” he said.
Little Cobina was intrigued as Philip tried to explain that, traditionally, royal princes did not have last names because everyone in the land was supposed to know who they were. Only the lower orders needed last names for identification. “Because there are so many of them,” said Philip, smiling, “and so few of us.”
He told her how he always crossed out “Mr.” at the top of the Admiralty forms and wrote in “Philip, Prince of Greece.” Somehow he managed to sound almost democratic and down-to-earth as he described the imperial prerogatives that separated royals from commoners. He dismissed the ceremonial rights as bothersome, and Cobina was charmed. Philip was so entranced that he stayed in Venice for the next three weeks to be her escort. They accepted every party invitation her mother engineered, dancing and dining and drinking other people’s champagne. Later, Cobina Sr. said the couple spent “passionate” evenings in gondolas on the Grand Canal. “Afterward Philip followed me to London,” confided her daughter.
Ignoring the marriage that awaited him with Princess Elizabeth, Philip gave his heart to the American beauty. He proposed to her, insisted they consider themselves engaged, and looked upon Cobina Sr. as his future mother-in-law. He even inscribed a photograph of himself: “To my dear Madre, from Philip.” He vowed to pursue her daughter to the United States.
“I shall come to America and get a job,” he said, “and
take the name of Augustus Jenks.”
Cobina Sr. was ecstatic that a prince was proposing marriage to her daughter. That he sprang from one of Europe’s most discredited royal families and lived on charity was only a slight concern. “A prince without a principality” was how she described the handsome young Viking. With or without money, he was still royalty. So she was determined to encourage his affair with her daughter. She gleefully accepted his suggestion that he leave Venice to follow them to London, and she was flattered when he invited himself to share their invitation from British actress Bea Lillie for a weekend at her country home.
“Philip gave me an impression at the time of a huge, hungry dog,” said his cousin Alexandra, “rather like a friendly collie who had never had a kennel of his own and responded to every overture with eager tail wagging.”
After three weeks in Venice, Cobina and Philip spent another week in England, dining, dancing, and walking London’s streets, hand in hand. They cried as they watched the French film Mayerling, a sad romance starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux. The night before Cobina and her mother sailed for America, Philip went to the Claridge Hotel to say good-bye. He gave Cobina a small gold bracelet with the words “I Love You” dangling close to a Greek flag. He cried again as he kissed her good-bye.
For the next three years he wrote to her twice a week. “They were impassioned love letters,” said Gant Gaither, one of Cobina’s lifelong friends. “He said he planned to woo her to marriage, no matter what. He desperately wanted to marry her, but Cobina Jr. just wasn’t all that interested.”
Other friends confirm the romance. “No question about it,” said writer Stephen Birmingham, who spent hours with Cobina Jr. in 1973 to write an article for Town & Country. “She did have an affair with Prince Philip, and her mother wanted her to marry him, but she just didn’t want to. She fell in love with Palmer Beaudette instead and married him in 1941. Her mother never forgave her.”