by Kitty Kelley
“They changed the guard at Buckingham Palace last night,” observed the Daily Mail in describing the theatrical wedding guests who sat in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey: playwright Noel Coward, ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, movie star Leslie Caron, and actress Margaret Leighton. The newspaper listed the names of actors, actresses, couturiers, hairdressers, interior decorators, restaurateurs, choreographers, dancers, writers, singers, and songwriters—all friends of the bridegroom. “These are the people who will dominate the social landscape,” the paper predicted, “not fusty aristocrats.”
“This wedding marked a new chapter for royalty,” said the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post. “Like the seventh son of the seventh son who eventually marries the beautiful Princess, the bridegroom was a new and magical link between Court and people. On pavement level, the marriage of Royalty with Royalty is a spectacle; but the marriage of a Princess with a photographer is a party.”
Less enthusiastic were a few Scottish aristocrats north of the border, who watched the wedding on television. They professed astonishment when the young Prince of Wales walked down the aisle dressed as a Highland chieftain. The BBC broadcaster said he thought Prince Charles looked delightful in his green doublet, lace jabot, and Royal Stuart kilt, but several Scots pointed out that the eleven-year-old Prince was improperly dressed in evening attire. They became even more indignant when Antony Armstrong-Jones appeared at the Royal Highland Games at Braemar in Scotland wearing trousers instead of a kilt. The nobility of Scotland had looked down on the House of Windsor ever since the Queen showed up for her Scottish coronation wearing a street dress instead of her coronation gown.
For everyone else, the wedding was a dazzling spectacle of royalty, from the bride’s diamond tiara to the five gold carriages transporting members of the royal family. Inside Westminster Abbey, the setting sparkled with more shades of gold than a Fabergé box. From the Queen’s gilt chair to the Archbishop’s polished miter to the solid gold altar plate, everything gleamed, reflecting immense wealth. A crowd of more than one hundred thousand people lined the procession route to cheer the Princess, whose wedding was the gayest and grandest ever staged by the royal family. Three million people watched on television, and schoolchildren were given the day off. For the first and only time in her life, Margaret was transported in a glass coach escorted by one hundred horsemen in gold braid. Awaiting her arrival, the crowds screamed: “We want Margaret! We want Margaret!”
Her state allowance was raised by Parliament from $18,000 to $45,000 per year. After a forty-four-day honeymoon in the Caribbean on the Britannia, which cost $30,000 a day, she and her new husband would return to a ten-room apartment in Kensington Palace that cost taxpayers $180,000 to renovate. British servicemen had had a portion of their wages deducted as a contribution toward a wedding present. The wedding itself had cost $78,000, which made the Queen uneasy. The Queen Mother shrugged off the expense, telling her daughter that she had to learn to live up to the lavish style people expected of royalty.
“There was nothing like it,” wrote Eve Perrick in the Daily Mail. “I have been to highly publicised weddings before. I was outside the Abbey when the Queen married Prince Philip. I saw Prince Rainier marry film star Grace Kelly. The unique quality of yesterday’s semi-state occasion was that it combined the best elements of both. It was a right royal affair.”
“The Queen alone looked disagreeable,” Noel Coward wrote in his diary. “Princess Margaret looked like the ideal of what any fairy-tale princess should look like… Prince Philip jocular and really very sweet and reassuring as he led the bride to the altar. The music was divine and the fanfare immensely moving. Nowhere in the world but England could such pomp and circumstance and pageantry be handled with such exquisite dignity… it was lusty, charming, romantic, splendid and conducted without a false note. It is still a pretty exciting thing to be English.”
Noel Coward would not live long enough to realize that what he had just seen was the beginning of the end. Royalty was unraveling. Within a few years this wedding would push the House of Windsor into what it feared most.
TEN
The First Lady was sitting in her bedroom at the White House when her secretary entered with yet another dispatch from the British Embassy. For weeks diplomatic cables had been rocketing between London and Washington regarding the Queen’s dinner party on June 5, 1961, in honor of the President and his First Lady. But she was exasperated.
“This is absurd,” she said to her secretary. “It’s not like I suggested inviting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”
The First Lady had suggested inviting her sister, Lee Radziwill, and Lee’s husband, the Polish Prince Stanislas Radziwill. But after the White House sent its proposed guest list to Buckingham Palace, the Radziwills were de-listed. By the Queen.
The Kennedys planned a stopover in London for a few days to attend the baptism of the President’s godchild, Christina Radziwill, after the President’s state visit to Paris. In London the Kennedys would stay with the Radziwills at their home on Buckingham Place, around the corner from the Palace. While there, President Kennedy wanted to meet informally with the British Prime Minister. Although Kennedy’s visit was private and not official, the British government recommended that the Queen entertain the President and his wife. The Queen agreed. It was to be the first time an American president had dined with a British monarch in Buckingham Palace since Woodrow Wilson was a guest in 1918.
A dinner party for fifty people was planned in the state dining room of the Palace, and the White House was asked to submit the names of people the Kennedys would like to attend. The First Lady proposed her host and hostess, the Radziwills, as well as Princess Margaret, whom Mrs. Kennedy wanted to meet; the President asked for Princess Marina of Kent, whom he had met during his year at Oxford. The Queen did not approve any of them.
Annoyed by the royal rebuff, the First Lady telephoned the British Embassy in Washington to speak to Her Majesty’s Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, who was also a close Kennedy family friend. He explained gently the Palace policy on divorce, saying that because this was an unofficial visit, the Radziwills, both of whom were divorced—once for her, twice for him—could not be invited to the Palace. If this were an official visit and the Radziwills were part of the official group accompanying the President, they would have to be invited.
“But she’s my sister,” Jackie told the British Ambassador, “and they are our hosts.”
The Ambassador sympathized and suggested that she call the U.S. Chief of Protocol, Angier Biddle Duke, to appeal the ruling through the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, David Bruce.
“Oh, Angie,” Jackie wailed, “you’ve got to help me.”
The diplomat reassured the First Lady and promised to contact David Bruce. Jackie then called her husband in the Oval Office to tell him what she had done. The President was irked. He quickly called Ambassador Bruce in London to say he did not want to cause an international incident.
The Ambassador noted the President’s conversation in his diary: “He wanted to make it clear that for his part he had no feeling about this incident, and any decision on the guest list must be the Queen’s.”
Her Majesty eventually relented and included the Radziwills; she even allowed them to be listed in the Court Circular for the occasion as “Prince” and “Princess.” That was a great concession because the Queen had never granted Radziwill royal license to use his Polish title* in Great Britain.
“She did not like him,” said Evangeline Bruce, the Ambassador’s wife. “It had nothing to do with divorce. My husband was divorced, and the Queen loved him. She just didn’t like Stash Radziwill… didn’t approve of him and always referred to him and his wife as Mr. and Mrs., which irritated them.”
“Anyway, the Queen had her revenge,” Jackie later told Gore Vidal, her stepbrother once removed. “No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture that they could find. The Queen was pretty heavy-g
oing. I think she resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.”
The Queen’s resentment was real. She had read the press coverage of the First Lady’s spectacular visit to Paris, where she had been hailed by the French newspapers as “ravissante,” “charmante,” “belle.” Parisians had lined the streets, waving American flags and screaming, “Jacquiii! Jacquiii! Jacquiii!” The Mayor of Paris had given her a $4,000 watch and pronounced her visit the most exciting since Queen Elizabeth II had paraded through the city four years earlier.
“Queen Elizabeth, hell,” presidential aide Dave Powers told the press. “They couldn’t get this kind of turnout with the Second Coming.”
Even the President was stunned by the excitement his wife had generated. Greeting reporters at a press conference in France, he introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
By the time the Kennedys arrived in London, Jackie fever had gripped the British, who lined the streets awaiting her arrival the same way they did for the Queen. One newspaper even dubbed the First Lady “Queen of America.” Another ran a cartoon showing the Statue of Liberty with Mrs. Kennedy’s face; one hand held the torch of freedom, the other clutched a copy of Vogue. The Evening Standard gushed, “Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on one thing they had always lacked—majesty.”
“The young President with his lovely wife and the whole glamour which surrounds them both caused something of a sensation,” recalled Prime Minister Macmillan in his memoirs. “Normally, the visits of foreign statesmen do not arouse much enthusiasm… but the Kennedys were news on every level, political and personal.”
The Prime Minister did not record Her Majesty’s displeasure at having to entertain them. The Queen, who was forever proclaiming her disdain of glamour, scorned Hollywood and all that the film colony represented. Unlike her mother, her sister, her husband, and her uncle Dickie, who felt cinema was the highest art form, the Queen was not receptive to Hollywood or its celebrities. In fact, she was so contemptuous of associating with motion picture stars that she declined to attend Grace Kelly’s 1956 wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. “Too many movie stars,” she said.
As Queen, she resisted all attempts to dress up her image. When a BBC producer timidly suggested she show more animation during her first televised Christmas address, she snapped, “I’m not an actress.”
For the same reason, she refused to wear a fur coat. “Absolutely not,” she told footman Ralphe White. “I look too much like a film star in mink.”
She acknowledged her dour image, saying that unlike her mother, she was not a show stopper. At a subdued rally, she noted, “If it were Mummy, they would all be cheering.”
Her husband shared her resolve that royalty must not descend to the level of movie stars. Like the Queen, he, too, would not sign autographs, and he resented efforts to make him perform. When he made a speech to the British Film Academy, he was heckled.
“Liven it up,” shouted actor Tom Bell. “Go on, tell us a funny story.”
The Duke of Edinburgh bristled. “If you want a funny story,” he said, “I suggest you engage a professional comic.”
Neither he nor the Queen recognized then that the British public wanted something more humane and spontaneous from their monarchy than an aloof wave from the royal coach.
“The Queen takes her Commonwealth responsibilities very seriously,” explained Prime Minister Macmillan, “and rightly so, for the responsibilities of the U.K. monarchy have so shrunk that if you left it at that, you might as well have a film star. She is impatient of the attitude toward her to treat her as a woman, and a film star or mascot.”
With the visit of the Kennedys, she was faced with entertaining the epitome of flashbulb glamour. The Queen had admitted to her sister that she felt more comfortable with President Eisenhower’s matronly wife, Mamie, than the mesmerizing Jackie, who was inciting the Queen’s normally sober subjects to act like crazed fans. They clogged the streets of London for hours, clamoring for a glimpse of the U.S. President and his First Lady.
In preparation for the Kennedy visit, the Lord Chamberlain, who usually exercises his powers of censorship only on an objectionable word or sentence, had banned a theatrical review that lampooned the President’s wife. The show, set to open in a Newcastle theater, was to have had a male chorus singing:
Here she comes, sing do re mi
Oh, what a change from old Auntie Mamie.
Then an actress was to appear in a black wig and impersonate Mrs. Kennedy in a satirical skit. Her routine, a string of barbed wisecracks, included the refrain
While Jack fumbles with Russia,
I use all my guile,
So the press and the public
won’t guess for awhile,
He’s just Ike dressed up Madison Avenue style.
I’m doing my best to be everyone’s choice,
playing Caroline’s mother with Marilyn’s voice.
The mention of Marilyn Monroe prompted the censor’s scissors. “The review deals unsuitably with a head of state’s private life,” was the Lord Chamberlain’s official explanation, which only added credibility to the rumors of the President’s intimate relationship with the Hollywood star.
Despite their differences, the Queen and the First Lady shared a similarity in their husbands, who were charismatic men. Extraordinarily handsome and witty, both were attracted to pretty actresses like fish to shiny metal objects. Neither man was hamstrung by romanticism, and both understood the social necessity of marrying well.
The Queen had not been impressed by the Kennedys’ ascent from the Irish bogs to the White House. She still remembered her parents’ antipathy toward the President’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy. As Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s he had opposed U.S. intervention on the side of the British in World War II, so President Franklin Roosevelt recalled him. Understandably the Queen was not enthusiastic about Kennedy’s son.
She came around eventually, but she was a late convert. During the 1960 presidential campaign, she privately supported Kennedy’s opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Publicly she remained silent, but her husband, who could and did speak out, made it clear. During a trip to New York City to open a British exhibition, Prince Philip showed a canny understanding of presidential politics. He did not overtly endorse Nixon, but he evoked the “special relationship” between America and England by saying, “The Queen was particularly delighted that our dear friend President Eisenhower agreed to join her as a patron for this exhibition.” Then he toured the exhibit with the Vice President and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and posed for pictures. When photographers begged the Prince for more photographs, he insisted on posing with the Vice President. “We can’t take a picture without Mr. Nixon,” he said.
When Kennedy won the election, the Queen was smart enough to realize the political importance of good relations with the United States. So she followed her Prime Minister’s recommendations to entertain the President and his wife at Buckingham Palace.
Jacqueline Kennedy later told Gore Vidal about the Queen’s dinner party, where she sat between Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten. During the reception before dinner, she talked to the Queen, whom she found chilly and standoffish.
“The Queen was only human once,” she recalled. “I was telling her about our state visit to Canada and the rigors of being on view at all hours. I told her I greeted Jack every day with a tearstained face. The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, ‘One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.’ Then she said, ‘You like pictures.’ And she marched me down a long gallery, stopping at a Van Dyck to say, ‘That’s a good horse.’ ”
The Queen and the First Lady shared more than their mutual love of horses. Both were to become mythic figures and the most celebrated women of their era. Both were monarchs—Elizabeth in fact, Jacqueline in fantasy. The crucial difference between them was politics
. The First Lady disliked politics and was totally apolitical; not so the Queen.
“God knows she’s supposed to be above politics,” said her biographer Roland Flamini, “but everyone knows the Queen gets politically involved, especially if it concerns the Commonwealth, which is all she really cares about. Her political involvement is never talked about, of course, but everyone knows.”
By March 1962 the Queen was embarked on a covert plan to influence the elections in Argentina. She did not realize then that doing her duty meant acquiescing to what her Prime Minister and Archbishop told her to do. Instead she wanted to affect policy. So she dispatched her husband to visit the British communities in eleven South American countries, ostensibly to promote British industry. In Argentina his real mission was to secure the presidency of a friend, Arturo Frondizi, who was in danger of being overthrown by supporters of exiled dictator Juan Perón.
The Queen and Philip had entertained Frondizi at Buckingham Palace earlier in the year, when he confided his fears about allowing Perón supporters to vote in the March elections. “Only my person,” he said, “stands between order and chaos.”
The Queen agreed and decided to do what she could to prevent a military overthrow that would lead to another dictatorship. Although Argentina was outside the Commonwealth, more Britons lived there than anywhere except the United States, and their imports and exports were important to British trade. At least, that was the Queen’s rationale for her intervention. Her husband thought it was empire building, which, he said, was basic to the British: “They are always meddling in other people’s business…. That’s why they’re so successful at British charity work overseas. I think it reflects a hangover from the years of responsibility for the direct management of other countries.”