The royals - Kitty Kelley [30]
He was quite candid about why when he met the political diarist Sir Henry (“Chips”) Channon. While visiting his mother in Athens, Philip spoke openly to Channon about his reasons for not becoming a fighter pilot, and Channon recorded the conversation on January 21, 1941: “I went to an enjoyable Greek cocktail party. Philip of Greece was there. He is extraordinarily handsome. He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy.”
By then the young midshipman knew his life’s direction and was steering himself toward an arranged marriage to the future Queen of England. Yet three years before, he had fallen in love with the most photographed girl in the world. Her name was Cobina Wright Jr., and Philip was bewitched. He met her in Venice during a holiday visit to his aunt Aspasia, the widow of King Alexander of Greece.
Philip had grown up around royalty—in addition to his uncle the Crown Prince of Sweden, another uncle was the exiled King of Greece, who was married to Princess Marie Bonaparte. She had once been the lover of the Prime Minister of France and later a disciple and patroness of Sigmund Freud. Philip’s cousin Princess Alexandra married the King of Yugoslavia, and his favorite cousin, Princess Frederika, granddaughter of the Kaiser and a former Hitler Youth member, became Queen of Greece. As a child Philip had spent time at Kensington Palace in London, the royal palaces of Bucharest and Sinaia, and the royal residence in Transylvania, visiting his cousin Prince Michael of Rumania. He called Queen Marie of Rumania “Aunt Missie.” He also visited another aunt, Queen Sophie of Greece, who was the Kaiser’s sister.
Accustomed to White Russians with gray teeth and European royals with high cheekbones, Philip had never experienced the dazzling megawatt glamour of American movie stars. Cobina Wright Jr. was all of that and more. She was Hollywood and high society, which was America’s version of royalty. A spellbinding blond beauty, she had appeared on the covers of Life and Ladies’ Home Journal as part of the Brenda Frazier debutante set. “That was when society really mattered,” said her mother, Cobina Wright Sr., a society columnist for the Hearst newspapers and a social mountaineer on the level of Philip’s uncle Dickie.
“My little Cobina was more than just a mere starlet,” she said. “After all, her father—my former husband—was a multimillionaire who was in the Social Register.” Following a nasty public divorce, Cobina Sr. lost her lofty listing in the Social Register. Without her husband’s money she was forced to earn a living, which she did by collecting the celebrities of her day—generals, politicians, movie stars, and those she breathlessly described as “the crème de la crème of society.”
“Mother was—well, so boisterous, so aggressive, always striving so hard to get to know the most famous, the most important people, that it used to embarrass me,” her daughter said.
An enterprising stage mother, Cobina Wright Sr. was grooming “little Cobina” for a career in the movies to be capped by an illustrious marriage. “Certainly, Cobina is the ‘most’ girl,” she said in 1938. “Most photographed, most publicized, most sought after.” By then her promotions had persuaded press agents to dub her eighteen-year-old daughter as “Miss Manhattan of the New York World’s Fair,” “the Best Dressed New York Supper Club Hostess,” and “the Most Beautiful Girl in Palm Beach.” She also made sure her daughter was described as “the darling of high society.”
At the time Cobina Jr. met Prince Philip, she was singing in nightclubs, modeling for John Robert Powers, and working