The royals - Kitty Kelley [23]
The Queen’s dresser had a full-time job just laying out the Queen’s various outfits for the day and coordinating the morning and evening jewels she wanted to wear with each ensemble. The royal dresser felt insulted when she was interrupted by a White House usher to relay a message from the Queen to a lady-in-waiting.
“I am Her Majesty’s maid,” snapped the woman, “not a messenger girl.” The White House usher did not understand the difference. Britain’s rigid class system extended from the top of society to the bottom, or “the lower orders,” as they were commonly called. In the hierarchy of royal service, household servants came first. They even had their own sitting room and dining room in the Palace. From their lofty perch, they looked down upon the stewards, clerks, and stenographers and refused to perform duties they deemed beneath them.
The King and Queen seemed unruffled by the fuss among their underlings. They felt at home in the country atmosphere of Hyde Park, especially when they found a tray of cocktails awaiting their arrival.
“My mother thinks you should have a cup of tea,” said the President. “She doesn’t approve of cocktails.”
“Neither does my mother,” said the King, gratefully reaching for a drink.
When the King and Queen returned to London, they dined with the U.S. Ambassador, and the Queen related this and other homey details of the Roosevelts’ picnic for them at Hyde Park. She mentioned the emotional farewell she and the King received when hundreds of people gathered at the train station and spontaneously started singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
Ambassador Kennedy had read the glowing press accounts of the royal visit to America in 1939. “The British sovereigns have conquered Washington, where they have not put a foot wrong,” wrote Arthur Krock in The New York Times, “and where they have left a better impression than even their most optimistic advisers could have expected.”
“They have a way of making friends, these young people,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even Kennedy, an isolationist, was impressed. But over dinner, as the Queen inched the conversation toward American foreign policy, he flared.
“What the American people fear more than anything else is being involved in a war,” he told her. “They say to themselves, ‘Never again!’ and I can’t say I blame them. I feel the same way.”
“I feel that way, too, Mr. Kennedy,” said the Queen. “But if we had the United States actively on our side, working with us, think how that would strengthen our position with the dictators.”
The President agreed with the Queen. Within months Roosevelt asked for Kennedy’s resignation. When the President heard that the Ambassador had told his private secretary, “Roosevelt and the kikes are taking us into war,” FDR told his wife, “I never want to see that son of a bitch again.” By that time the Ambassador—he relinquished the position but never the title—was despised in England for his appeasement policies. “He left London during the Blitz,” said Conor O’Clery, Washington correspondent for the Irish Times, “and the British never forgave him.”
The Queen did not have to resort to a hard sell with her American show business friends. The feeling among artists and entertainers was that if Britain were involved in a war, the United States was bound to come in sooner or later, because living in a totalitarian world was unthinkable.
The Queen was naturally drawn to show business people. The American theatrical producer Jack Wilson enjoyed special access to the Palace because he was the close friend and business partner of Noel Coward, who was the Queen’s favorite playwright and part of her high camp coterie. After the abdication, Coward had endeared himself by suggesting that statues of Wallis Simpson be erected throughout England for the