The royals - Kitty Kelley [29]
While Philip’s mother was incapacitated, his maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, stepped in to care for the ten-year-old boy, who was sent to England. She shared the responsibility for Philip with her eldest son, George, the Marquess of Milford Haven. His wife, Nada, who bathed her feet in champagne, was as exotic as Edwina Mountbatten. Both were rich, restless, and reputed to be sexually adventurous. During the 1934 custody trial for Gloria Vanderbilt in New York City, a maid testified to seeing evidence of a lesbian relationship between young Gloria’s mother and Nada. “She put her arms around Mrs. Vanderbilt and kissed her,” said the maid. The lurid testimony about “kissing on the lips” was not reported in the British newspapers because the Milford Havens were close to the British royal family and the press would not report anything that reflected negatively on the monarchy. That royal protection extended to Nada’s husband, George Milford Haven, who was bisexual and obsessed with pornography. According to his personal financial records, he spent more than $100,000 amassing a vast collection of albums of erotic photographs and sadomasochistic books dealing with incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and family orgies, where mother and son joined father and daughter in sexual relations. George invested a fortune in buying catalogs for artificial genitalia, aphrodisiacs, horsewhips, and instruments for self-flagellation. After his death, part of his pornography collection ended up in a private case in the British Museum. He was only forty-six when he died of cancer in 1938, and his task of looking after Philip fell to George’s younger brother, Lord Louis Mountbatten. “That’s when Uncle Dickie took over,” said Philip. “Before that no one thinks I ever had a father…. Most people think that Dickie’s my father, anyway.”
Within ten years Philip had attended four schools, all paid for by various relatives. One rich aunt financed his first two years at The Elms, a school for wealthy Americans in St. Cloud, near Paris. His British relatives paid for his next four years at the Old Tabor School, Cheam, in Surrey, one of England’s oldest, most traditional preparatory schools. Then his sisters decided he should be educated in Germany, so at the age of twelve—in 1933—he was enrolled in Schloss Salem in Baden, a school run by a brother-in-law. “Scholarship was not important when Philip and I were going to school at Salem,” recalled actress Lilly Lessing. “The emphasis then was on courage, honesty, and taking care of people who were weaker than you… and Philip, who was very athletic, excelled even then. He was very much influenced by Dr. Kurt Hahn—we all were—but Dr. Hahn was Jewish, so he had to leave Germany. He sought refuge in Scotland, where he started Gordonstoun, and Philip followed him a year later.”
Kurt Hahn, who was described by some former students as “strong and dogmatic, probably a repressed homosexual,” ran an experimental school that became the forerunner for Outward Bound. All discussion of sex was forbidden at Hahn’s school, where the military curriculum included a rigorous regime of exhausting exercise, two icy showers a day, and bracing hikes before breakfast. Philip, who became one of Hahn’s most devoted followers, thrived at Gordonstoun, earning good grades and excelling at sports. He became captain of the cricket and hockey teams.
In his five years at Gordonstoun, his family never visited him once, and without a home of his own, he was shuffled off to relatives for holidays. He received some spending money from one of his uncles, the Crown Prince of Sweden, but it was never enough to cover all his expenses. Frequently he had to borrow clothes from his friends, who remember scrambling to find him a suit, cuff links, and collar studs so that he could be dressed properly for the wedding of his cousin Marina to the Duke of Kent.
After graduation from Gordonstoun,