The royals - Kitty Kelley [301]
* Mountbatten objected to his son-in-law’s collaborating on a book. He phoned the writer and invited her for lunch. After a round of drinks he said, “Now, now, Miss Robyns. Be a good girl and give me those tapes.” She refused.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I had all of David’s old gay boyfriends on tape, saying terrible things about him, and I didn’t think it right to release them.” Mountbatten threatened to sue her. She gave in. “I couldn’t fight a man with his money, so we ended up going to his lawyer’s office and burning the tapes.” Hicks waited until after Lord Mountbatten’s death to contact another writer, June Ducas, to resume work on his life story. “June can write whatever she likes, warts and all,” he said in 1995. “I don’t give a damn.”
* When Angus Ogilvy, a commoner, married Margaret’s cousin, Princess Alexandra, daughter of Marina, the Duchess of Kent, on April 24, 1963, he refused the Queen’s offer of an earldom. “I don’t see why I should get a peerage,” said Ogilvy, “simply because I have married a princess.”
* When the Nazis invaded Poland, Radziwill fled Warsaw for London, where he became a British subject. Legally he forfeited the right to use his hereditary title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been conferred on his family in the sixteenth century. His insistence on being addressed as Prince Radziwill remained controversial in Britain.
* The Queen admitted her preference for Churchill when asked, “Which of your Prime Ministers, ma’am, did you enjoy your audiences with most?” She said, “Winston, of course, because it was always such fun.”
* The President of the United States was absent from the assemblage of five prime ministers, four kings, four presidents, three premiers, two chancellors, one queen, and one grand duke, who represented their countries at Winston Churchill’s funeral. Lyndon Baines Johnson stayed in his bed at the White House and watched the funeral on television. “The President has a cold,” asserted his press secretary, who added that Johnson’s previous heart attack made his doctors especially vigilant. That Churchill was half American on his mother’s side was a special source of pride to Americans, many of whom were embarrassed that their President did not attend the funeral of the country’s most famous honorary citizen and did not send his Vice President to represent him. Instead the President dispatched his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, who came down with a cold in London and could not attend. So the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, represented America. Former President Eisenhower attended the funeral because he had commanded Allied Forces during World War II.
† Such an appropriate gesture contrasts with Philip’s behavior the day after Churchill’s death when he wanted to go on a shoot. Mountbatten said it was inappropriate during a period of national mourning, but Philip was unconvinced. “Well, I won’t anyway,” said Mountbatten, who refused to accompany him. Philip canceled the shoot.
* The first Court Circular was issued in the eighteenth century by King George III, who became annoyed by newspaper inaccuracies about the royal family’s activities. So the King appointed the Court Newsman to prepare a definitive document to be supplied to newspapers every day.
* “It’s the lowest honor you can have from Britain,” Paul McCartney told Newsweek thirty years later, explaining the honor bestowed no title (“not so much as a sir”) and little prestige. The milkman, who delivered to the Prime Minister’s official residence, received the MBE. This was not lost on Britain’s biggest pop star. “It’s the lowest, ” said McCartney. “But you can’t sit around saying, ‘God, I wish they’d make me a sir.’ ”
The Queen finally bestowed a knighthood on the Beatle in 1997, citing McCartney’s “services to music” in her New Year’s Honors List. Acknowledging the honor, Sir Paul said, “It’s been a hard day’s knighthood.”
* The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 requires that all relatives