The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  On the cold gray day of the funeral, the Queen lent her carriage full of blankets and hot-water bottles to Lady Churchill and her two daughters. Her Majesty then paid special homage to her first Garter Knight by arriving in St. Paul’s before his coffin and his official mourners, and not last, as is her due as Queen.

  After the majestic funeral, the royal family joined the dignitaries from 110 nations* on the steps of the cathedral as Sir Winston’s coffin was returned to the gun carriage for the final ride to his burial place in the little country churchyard of Bladon in Oxfordshire. The Queen’s wreath was placed on the gravesite with a card: “From the nation and the Commonwealth in grateful remembrance—Elizabeth R.” The great bells of St. Paul’s pealed and the cannons reverberated as ninety salutes were fired—one for every year of Churchill’s remarkable life. Dressed in his naval uniform, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had been a young lieutenant during World War II, stepped forward to give the old warrior a last salute.†

  “There can be no leavetaking between Churchill and the people he served and saved,” said Lady Asquith in the House of Lords. “Many of us today may be feeling that by his going the scale of things has dwindled, our stature is diminished, that glory has departed from us…. Then I remember the words of his victory broadcast—when he urged us not to fall back into the rut of inertia, confusion, and ‘the craven fear of being great.’ And I knew that the resolve to keep unbroken the pattern of greatness which he had impressed upon the spirit of the nation is the tribute he would ask from us today.”

  Despite her ringing words, Britain had lost her greatness. The country was struggling to keep her footing in a cold war with a former ally, Moscow, while forced to make friends with a former enemy, Bonn. Four months after burying Winston Churchill, who had railed against “the hideous onslaught of the Nazi war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers,” the Queen visited West Germany. It was her first trip to the country that had battered England in two world wars. Her husband had gone there many times before to see his sisters and his brothers-in-law, but because of the bitter anti-German sentiments in England, his trips had not been publicized. The Queen had wanted to accompany him, but each time her request had been denied by the conservative Tory government, which knew that the public would never accept a royal visit so soon after the war. Now under a Labor Prime Minister, who wanted to end the old hostilities, the Queen was asked to make the trip in May 1965, the first time a British sovereign had visited Germany since 1913, when her grandfather, King George V, went to see his relatives.

  At the time of Churchill’s death, the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau recalled the Nazi invective against the British Prime Minister. “Nothing remains of the Nazi tirades,” said the newspaper. “Those who authorized them have not only disappeared, but they have been proved wrong.”

  The newspaper repeatedly warned Germans against screaming out “Sieg heil!” when the Queen inspected the soldiers of the Bundeswehr and the airmen of the Luftwaffe. Instead they were told to wave the paper Union Jacks that would be distributed and to call out her name.

  Newspapers and magazines stressed the theme of reconciliation by publishing the Windsor family tree with its German roots, including the names of Elizabeth and Philip’s four hundred royal relatives still living in Germany: the princely Hanovers, Hohenzollerns, Brunswicks, and Glucksburgs dusted off their old decorations in anticipation of the royal visit.

  “If we can’t have our own Bavarian monarch back,” said a city official in Munich, “at least we can borrow someone else’s for a short while.”

  “After all,” said his aide, “they are almost German, aren’t they?”

  For Germans, the Queen’s presence meant that England had finally forgiven them. Her words underscored her healing mission, despite the grimace she made when she first saw the ugly barbed-wire spikes on the Berlin Wall. “The tragic period is over,” she said, her English being translated to German. “If we wish to preserve the best of our great heritage, we must make common cause…. In the last twenty years, the problems facing our two peoples have brought us closer together again. It is now our task to defend civilization in freedom and peace together.”

  The crowds shouted, “Eee-liz-a-bet, Eee-liz-a-bet!” but the Queen did not smile or wave. In fact, she recoiled from the enthusiastic response. “I think she thought this was a bit too much of a good thing,” said British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, “too reminiscent of ritual Nazi shouting. That was the only time I saw her perhaps at all put out.”

  With more dignity than warmth, the Queen went to ten cities in eleven days and was widely praised. “For the thirty-nine-year-old British monarch, theoretically above politics,” said U.S. News & World Report, “it was a highly political performance.”

  Criticism toward the Crown had become increasingly strident. In 1957, after Lord Altrincham criticized the Queen as “priggish” and “a pain in the neck,” he was slugged by a man on the street who considered his words blasphemous. A year later, when Malcolm Muggeridge, a leading British journalist, dismissed the Queen as “a nice, homely little woman” whose monarchy was “a transparent hoax,” he was banned from appearing on the BBC. Yet within ten years criticism of the Crown had become commonplace. Students in the sixties were apathetic toward the monarchy. To them the royal family seemed irrelevant, almost laughable. Movie houses had stopped playing the National Anthem because too many young people booed. The Oxford University Union debated the resolution: “The Monarchy should be sacked, Buckingham Palace given to the homeless, and the corgis put to productive work.”

  The monarchy could still count on the establishment press—the Times and the Daily Telegraph— to pay homage. Both newspapers published the Court Circular,* which lists the activities of the royal family and is delivered to the papers by Palace messenger every day. One day in 1966, according to a Telegraph editor, that delivery was jeopardized because of what the Palace perceived as a gross lack of deference.

  “We cannot go on supplying you with the Court Circular,” a Palace spokesman told the editor, “if you continue with your unjustifiable attacks on the Princess Margaret.”

  “What attacks?” asked the editor, who was embarrassed by his newspaper’s subservience to the royal family.

  “What attacks indeed?” said the Palace spokesman. “You know perfectly well that as a Princess of the Blood Royal, she is entitled to the word ‘the’ in front of her name.”

  The omission was duly rectified.

  During the same period, the Sunday Times commissioned a Cambridge don to write a small biography of the Queen for a feature entitled “The 1,000 Men and Women of the Century.” The biography referred to the Queen as belonging to the “regnum of mass consumption… like most carefully designed products, the Queen comes flavourless, harmless, beautifully packaged but a bit expensive…. Cluttered with amiable feudal eccentricities… the monarchy survives to restore its earliest function, to celebrate the rite of fantasy.”

  The don’s contribution was immediately rejected. A more respectful editor rewrote the piece and referred to Her Majesty as “charming, witty and wise… with beautiful eyes and a peaches and cream complexion.”

  Even the blinkered courtiers noticed a lack of deference among young people and tried to make the Queen appear more relevant. They announced she would honor the Beatles with the Member of the Order of the British Empire.*

  “Wow,” said John Lennon. “I thought you had to drive tanks and win wars to get the MBE.”

  Some people protested the award to the Beatles by returning their MBEs to the Palace, the first time such honors had ever been renounced. Lennon was furious. “Army officers received their medals for killing people,” he said. “We got ours for entertaining. On balance, I’d say we deserve ours more.”

  Four years later he returned the medal to the Queen to protest British involvement in the Nigerian civil war and Britain’s support of U.S. action in Vietnam. “Really should not have tak
en it,” Lennon said of the honor. “Felt I had sold out….” One man who had sent his medal back to the Palace in protest of the Beatles’ award now asked to have it returned.

  When the four working-class lads from Liverpool arrived at Buckingham Palace in 1965 to receive their medals, they had to be protected by police from their screeching fans. Newspapers reported that they huddled in a Palace lavatory before meeting the Queen and smoked marijuana.

  “We’ve played Frisco’s Cow Palace, but never one like this,” said Paul McCartney after the visit. “It’s a keen pad.”

  “And Her Majesty?” asked a reporter.

  “She was like a mum to us.”

  He paid amused homage to the Queen by writing a lyric in her honor entitled “Her Majesty’s a Pretty Nice Girl, But She Doesn’t Have a Lot to Say.”

  The next year the Queen broke with precedent to knight a Roman Catholic, a black, and a rabbi. She even gave her divorced cousin the Earl of Harewood permission to remarry* when she found out his mistress was pregnant. Still, she was criticized for being out of touch with the times. Philip thought the problem was dull domesticity, which he said the Queen represented when she had another child in 1964. “Nothing more ordinary than a middle-aged Queen with a middle-aged husband and four growing children,” he told a group of journalists. “I would have thought that we’re entering the least interesting period of our kind of glamorous existence…. There used to be much more interest. Now people take it all as a matter of course. Either they can’t stand us, or they think we’re all right.”

  In promoting the Firm, as Philip called the royal family, he traveled constantly to open British exhibits, push British products, support British trade. Always, the mystique of royalty had insured enthusiastic crowds for him and the Queen, especially in America. But by 1966 no one seemed to care. So when he agreed to tour the United States to raise money for Variety Clubs International, he summoned a Hollywood press agent.

  “I was the lucky guy,” said Henry Rogers of Rogers & Cowan, the Los Angeles– based public relations firm. “Although I’ve represented the biggest names in Hollywood, like Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth, I got a special thrill out of having a member of the royal family as a client…. Before I got the assignment, I had to go to Buckingham Palace to meet with Prince Philip. He was polite, a bit reserved, but very gracious. Best of all, he was receptive to my ideas.”

  Rogers’s first suggestion was for the Prince to hold a press conference in every city. Prince Philip laughed.

  “Oh, God, Henry,” he said. “I’ve never done a press conference* before. We never do things like that in the royal household. It’s just contrary to our policy. But if you think we should have a press conference, then we’ll have a press conference…. But there have to be a few ground rules, and I would appreciate it if you would alert the press in advance to what they are.”

  The Duke of Edinburgh then explained his constrained role as Consort. “First, make it clear to them that I am not in the British government. Press outside Great Britain are often confused about what role the Queen and I play in our country. Not being a part of the government, I cannot very well answer questions about the British economy, the Tory versus Labor Party, the Prime Minister, the union problems, and inflation. Second, I will not handle any personal questions about the Queen. Outside of that, you can declare open season and let them fire away.”

  The press agent told the Prince not to worry. “All the questions will be inane,” he said. And most were. But Philip handled them with breezy humor.

  “Tell us about the London Symphony,” said a reporter in Miami.

  “It plays good music,” said Philip.

  “Have you considered sending your children to a U.S. school?”

  “An absolutely truthful answer is no, but now you’re making me think about it. Hmmmm. The answer is still no.”

  “What do you think of the success of the Beatles?* As an export product, don’t they bring more money into Britain?”

  “It’s a very small return for some of the things imposed on Britain.”

  “Is this your first visit to America?”

  “No,” said Philip. “My first visit was during the reign of Harry Truman.”

  “Why is the Queen’s birthday—”

  “Don’t ask me to explain why it is that she has an official birthday in June when her proper birthday is in April. You’ll just have to accept it, like cricket, pounds, shillings, and pence, and other quaint British customs.”

  Reporters were amused by the Prince, and in every city he received laudatory press coverage. He raised a million dollars for charity and returned home convinced that the Palace needed the British version of a Hollywood press agent. The Queen rejected his idea as utterly preposterous, saying that she did not have to sell herself or her monarchy.

  “My father never did,” she said.

  “He didn’t need to,” said her husband. “He had Winston Churchill and World War Two.” This prompted a quarrel in front of the footman.

  Philip again referred to the Firm in front of a group of journalists. “To survive, the monarchy has to change,” he said. “No one wants to end up like a brontosaurus, who couldn’t adapt himself, and ended up stuffed in a museum. It isn’t exactly where I want to end up myself.”

  He continued to badger his wife about the problem, but she did not pay much attention—until the morning he stormed into her bedroom suite, waving his copy of the Sunday Telegraph, the conservative right-wing royalist newspaper he once jokingly called “the family bugle.”

  “You might be interested in this,” he said, slapping the front page down in front of her.

  The Queen put on her spectacles and read the article about the “marked change in the public’s attitude toward the Crown.”

  Philip paced up and down in front of the Queen’s footman.

  Without comment she continued to read:

  Most people care much less than they did—particularly the young, many of whom regard the Queen as the arch-square. They are not against in the sense of being for a republic. They are quite simply indifferent…. The British monarchy will not be swept away in anger, but it could well be swallowed up in a great and growing yawn.

  A few weeks later, when her press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, retired, an energetic Australian, William Heseltine, succeeded him. “When I took over, things were bound to change,” he said. “The essence of the Queen’s role is communication, and it needed improvement…. During the sixties, the family had dropped from the news pages to the gossip columns. I wanted to rectify that by getting them back from the gossip columns onto the news pages where they belonged, and by making greater use of television.”

  Heseltine’s first responsibility was to handle preparations for the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales.* Years before, the Queen had promised the people of Wales that she would present her eldest son to them at Caernarvon Castle. She decided that Charles was ready to be crowned a few months before his twenty-first birthday. She agreed to have the investiture televised because she felt the miniature coronation ceremony was part of the continuity of the monarchy.

  The BBC television producer suggested making a biographical film of Prince Charles, but the Queen and Prince Philip said no; they thought their son was too inexperienced to handle unscripted questions. The producer then suggested a film showing what sort of life Prince Charles faced as the heir apparent. Again the Queen and Prince Philip said no, but, influenced by the enthusiasm of Heseltine for television, they agreed to consider a documentary about the royal family and the work they do. The new Palace press secretary wanted to show the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and their four children as something more than stiff cardboard cutouts. “No one knew them as people,” he said. “We needed to make them more rounded and human for the general public.” In this he was supported by Lord Mountbatten, who had recently filmed an eight-part series on his life for the BBC.

  Still, the Queen resisted. She did not want th
e monarchy to have anything to do with show business, and she certainly did not want her family acting like television stars. “I’m not Jackie Kennedy and this isn’t the White House,” she said, referring to the First Lady’s televised tour of the White House. The Queen disliked performing on television and could never relax in front of the camera. She dreaded having to televise her annual Christmas message, which was staged and carefully produced with makeup artists, technicians, and TelePrompTers. She could not conceive of having television cameras follow her around every day, recording her offhand remarks and actions.

  “The Queen also questioned if it would be sensible to allow television to intrude into the family’s private life,” recalled Heseltine. “In the end, however, she agreed.”

  It took three months of negotiation to get her approval. “You know the proverb ‘When elephants wrestle, it is the grass that suffers,’ ” said one man involved in the discussions. “There was Prince Philip to contend with; he kept saying, ‘Most journalists just want the shot where you’re seen picking your nose,’ and Cawston [BBC documentary executive] kept saying, ‘I’m not a journalist.’ Then there was Mountbatten, who, of course, knew all there was to know about broadcasting, and Mountbatten’s son-in-law, Lord Brabourne, who as a film producer actually did know something. He was the one who brought on Richard Cawston, head of the BBC’s documentary department.”

  The Queen finally gave her consent to the film when she was assured total editorial control, including the copyright,* plus half the profits from worldwide sales.† She then agreed to allow the BBC’s camera crew inside her office at Buckingham Palace during her weekly audience with the Prime Minister, which previously had been so privileged that even her husband had been excluded. She also invited the television crew into her home at Balmoral for a family picnic. To sell to the lucrative American market, she suggested a segment with President Nixon on his visit to London and another segment showing Walter Annenberg presenting his credentials as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. “We need something special,” said the Queen.