The royals - Kitty Kelley [18]
As a commoner, the Duchess was respected for accepting the royal responsibility of producing an heir and a spare, even if it meant being artificially seeded. “Our family knew that Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were born by artificial means,” said a relative of the Earl of Arran. “It was revolutionary at the time, but it was not discussed publicly and probably never should be….”
By the end of the war, the Queen Mother had become a living saint to be praised and preserved. Because the country lionized her, the press followed suit and never printed a negative word about her. Even when every intimate detail of the royal family became newspaper fodder, she alone remained immune. The media respectfully refrained from reporting that as a result of intestinal surgery she wore a colostomy bag. Her incessant drinking, which might be described as incipient alcoholism in anyone else, was dismissed as mere tippling. Her propensity for gambling was never reported as an addiction, just an innocent pastime of a sweet old lady who happened to have installed in her house her own personal “blower,” or bookie wire, to receive up-to-the-minute race results. Her support of white minority rule in Rhodesia was tagged not as racist, but rather as a right-wing political quirk. By the standards of her time, she was excused for calling people of color “blackamoors” and “nig nogs.” “She is not fond of black folk,” wrote Paul Callan in the International Express, “but these are, of course, traits typical of her age and class.”
Even the satirical television program Spitting Image held back on lampooning the most beloved member of the royal family. “For the first show, we had prepared a sketch of the Queen Mother arm-wrestling Princess Margaret over a bottle of vodka,” recalled Roger Law, “but the producer, John Lloyd, refused to let us debut with that skit…. We had to wait until the public accepted the show. The shock was that we treated the royal family as an ordinary family….”
“The Queen Mother was so untouchable by 1994 that I was prohibited from alluding to the possibility of her death in a piece of fiction,” said writer Sue Townsend, author of The Queen and I. “When I adapted my book to be a play, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, Max Stafford-Clark, refused to let me use the scene of the Queen Mother’s funeral. He was afraid of the public outcry and what might happen to him as a result. So I had to rewrite that part. I went along with it because I was in awe of the director and wanted the play produced.”
When another writer reported some harmless remarks the Queen Mother had made over lunch, he was called a scoundrel. “I was denounced… as a cad for repeating the old lady’s conversation,” said A. N. Wilson, who broke the taboo of never repeating the unrehearsed words of a royal personage.
Writing in the Spectator, he reported the Queen Mother’s merry recollection of an evening during the war when she met T. S. Eliot. She was worried that her children were not receiving a proper education, so she asked that a poetry evening be arranged at Windsor Castle.
“Such an embarrassment,” she recalled. “We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem… I think it was called ‘The Desert.’ And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King.”
“ ‘The Desert,’ ma’am? Are you sure it wasn’t called ‘The Waste Land’?”
“That’s it,” said the Queen Mother. “I’m afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn’t understand a word.”
“I believe he did once work in a bank,” said the writer. He was roundly criticized for presenting the beloved Queen Mother as a philistine. By then she had become an icon.
“Perhaps the most loved person in the Western world,” suggested Sir Edward Ford, former assistant private secretary to the Queen.