The royals - Kitty Kelley [24]
Jack Wilson arrived at Windsor Castle and was escorted through the grand dining room, where the King and Queen had hired an artist to paint the backs of the Constable, Reynolds, and Gainsborough canvases with the cartoon faces of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to liven up the gloomy atmosphere for their children. Wilson was amused when the King’s footman confided this small detail of royal family life. The servant then tiptoed across the Aubusson carpet, reached up, and slyly turned over a gilded portrait of Charles II to reveal the goofy grin of Walt Disney’s floppy-eared dog Pluto.
Wilson followed the footman into the Queen’s sitting room, where her thirteen-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was playing on the floor. Wilson smiled at the youngster and greeted her pleasantly.
“Well, hello there, cutie pie,” he said. “How’re you doing today?”
The footman froze, unable to continue into the room. The youngster stared hard at the producer. Then she raised her arm and pointed to the floor.
“Bow, boy, bow,” she told the forty-year-old man.
The teenage heir to the throne had been trained to demand her royal entitlements.
“And you know what I did?” said the producer, laughing as he recalled his introduction to the young woman who would become the sixty-third sovereign of the oldest royal house in Europe. “I bowed my arse off because that little girl scared the living bejabbers out of me.”
The Lord Chamberlain had had a similar experience when he encountered the Princess in a Palace corridor.
“Good morning, little lady,” he said.
“I’m not a little lady,” she snapped. “I’m Princess Elizabeth.”
Hearing the youngster’s uppity tone disturbed Queen Mary, her grandmother. An hour later the elderly Queen had her granddaughter in tow as she knocked on the Lord Chamberlain’s door.
“This is Princess Elizabeth,” announced Queen Mary, “who hopes one day to be a lady.”
Days later the Princess, in a fury, demanded a favor of her governess. The governess said no, but the Princess persisted. Finally she shouted: “This is royalty speaking.” Her mother remonstrated: “Royalty has never been an excuse for bad manners.”
Still, the young Princess never learned to conceal her imperiousness. From the age of ten she had been reared as the next Queen of England.* Platoons of liveried butlers, footmen, and chauffeurs bowed to her whenever she entered a room, and maids, nannies, and dressers fell to the floor in obeisant curtsies. And whenever she entered or departed the royal houses of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Balmoral, and Birkall, the scarlet-uniformed guards at the gates snapped to attention and performed the stately exercise of “presenting arms”—saluting her with a rifle or saber.
This royal treatment fascinated her. The first time she discovered the attention she commanded, she slipped away from her nurse and paraded back and forth in front of the Palace guard, who clicked his heels, raised his rifle, and stood ramrod straight each time she passed.
Her name was given to bone china, to hospitals, and even to chocolates. Her wax figure, sitting on the white pony she received for her fourth birthday, stood in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Flags were flown on her birthday, and her face appeared on a six-cent stamp in Newfoundland. Her portrait hung in the Royal Academy, and her picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine. This reverence worried her father, who wrote to his mother, Queen Mary: “It almost frightens me that the people should love her so much. I suppose it is a good thing, and I hope she will be worthy of it, poor little darling.”
The young Princess had a few ordinary experiences, such as Christmas shopping at Woolworth’s, riding in the top deck of a bus, and traveling incognito on the underground. But she had never ridden in a taxi or placed her own telephone call. She was so protected