The royals - Kitty Kelley [219]
Barratt went on to say: “Now Princess Alexandra [the daughter of Princess Marina, who married the Duke of Kent] is different…. She and Philip have been long involved…. She’s the Queen’s first cousin—a tall blond beauty who married Sir Angus Ogilvy…. Her looks are reminiscent of Princess Anne, who is Philip’s favorite child. You’ll notice that many of his mistresses have his daughter’s long, lean looks. The same horsey teeth, arched hair, Knightsbridge [slim] legs….
“Basically, Philip is not a happy man. He’s solidly married, but not happily…. He’s blindingly energetic; travels constantly to fill the void of being the Queen’s husband…. He probably should’ve married some rich American woman, had a good time, and then divorced her. At least he’d have autonomy. Here, he looks like a kept man, and for someone as proud as he is, that’s dehumanizing.”
What the Queen did not see, she overlooked, and her husband pursued his flirtations with discretion. Except for the occasional actress, he confined himself to married women within the nobility. The aristocratic wives were impressed by his royal lineage and reveled in his attentions. The few who were not flattered pretended otherwise because he was married to the Queen. “It’s a subtle form of blackmail,” said one woman, who was subjected to what she called “an excessive overture” from the Duke of Edinburgh.
When one of the Queen’s bankers was invited to Balmoral for a house party, he brought his very attractive wife. Philip insisted that she and the other female guests join him in a musical parlor game. He arrayed the women in a circle around him, and he stood in the middle. Placing a bottle of wine between his legs, he told the women they had to remove it without using their hands. The competition was to take the bottle away from him with their legs before the music stopped. “No hands, now,” he warned the banker’s wife. “No hands.” Deeply embarrassed, she played the Duke’s game because she said it would have been rude to decline.
“My wife felt the same way when he asked her to dance,” said Robin Knight Bruce, an army officer. “Philip is Colonel-in-Chief of the Queen’s royal Irish Hussars, and he comes to the regimental dinners to grope the officers’ wives. When he did it to my wife, I went to my supervisor and said, ‘Do not let the fucking Duke of Edinburgh dance with my wife again or I’ll kick him in the balls and so will she.’ ”
For a sophisticated man who spoke three languages, traveled the world, collected art, painted, and published numerous books, the Duke of Edinburgh could act like an oafish adolescent. One of his son’s young girlfriends said she was “terribly embarrassed” by his juvenile behavior. Romy Adlington was sixteen years old when she spent her first weekend with Prince Edward and the royal family. She said that the sixty-six-year-old duke leered and winked, patted her bottom when she walked down the hall to her room, and ogled her cleavage during dinner. She did not realize that it could have been worse.
“If it’s in his head, it’s on his plate,” said one of his former equerries, dismissing Philip’s frank observations about women and sex. The former aide smiled as he described the Duke as “a man’s man.” In his defense, the aide offered a “boys will be