The royals - Kitty Kelley [108]
“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 taken 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