The royals - Kitty Kelley [32]
For the next three years he wrote to her twice a week. “They were impassioned love letters,” said Gant Gaither, one of Cobina’s lifelong friends. “He said he planned to woo her to marriage, no matter what. He desperately wanted to marry her, but Cobina Jr. just wasn’t all that interested.”
Other friends confirm the romance. “No question about it,” said writer Stephen Birmingham, who spent hours with Cobina Jr. in 1973 to write an article for Town & Country. “She did have an affair with Prince Philip, and her mother wanted her to marry him, but she just didn’t want to. She fell in love with Palmer Beaudette instead and married him in 1941. Her mother never forgave her.”
Cobina Sr. kept writing to the young Prince long after her daughter had discarded him to marry Beaudette, an heir to an automobile fortune. The resilient Prince, still serving in the Royal Navy, resumed correspondence with his cousin Princess Elizabeth of England. But for the rest of his life, he, like his father, would be susceptible to the charms of actresses.
“At that time, most girls had someone they wrote to at sea or at the front,” recalled Elizabeth’s governess, Marion (“Crawfie”) Crawford. “I think at the start she liked to be able to say that she, too, was sending off an occasional parcel and writing letters to a man who was fighting for his country.”
One day Crawfie noticed Philip’s photograph on the Princess’s mantelpiece.
“Is that altogether wise?” Crawfie asked. “A number of people come and go. You know what that will lead to. People will begin all sorts of gossip about you.”
“Oh, dear, I suppose they will,” the Princess replied.
The picture disappeared a few days later. In its place was another one of Philip with a bushy blond mustache and beard covering half his face.
“There you are, Crawfie,” said the Princess. “I defy anyone to recognize who that is. He’s completely incognito in that one.”
Rumors started anyway, and soon the backstairs gossip ended up in a newspaper item that it was Prince Philip of Greece whose photograph graced the bedroom of Princess Elizabeth. Uncle Dickie was delighted.
“Dear Philip” and “Dear Lilibet” letters crisscrossed from Windsor Castle to destroyers in the Mediterranean, the Straits of Bonifacio, Algiers, Malta, Suez, Ceylon, and Australia. The midshipman, who had formally renounced his claim to the Greek throne, was promoted in 1942 from the rank of sublieutenant to lieutenant. The next year Philip returned to England and did not go back to sea for four months. During that time he was invited to Windsor Castle for Christmas. Years later he said he accepted the invitation “only because I’d nowhere particular to go.” He told risqué jokes to Queen Mary, who pronounced him “a very bright young man.” He regaled King George VI with reports of German aircraft dive-bombing his ship off Sicily and bragged about dodging mines and torpedoes, accentuating his part in helping win a great victory. “It was a highly entertaining account,” the King said later. Knowing that Philip had been cited for valor, the King had listened attentively, but there was something about the brash young man with his loud laugh and blunt manner that irritated him. As an overprotective father, he could not envision his beloved Lilibet marrying any man, and certainly not one as rough as Philip. Even worse, he wasn’t rich and didn’t dress like a gentleman. “His wardrobe is ghastly,” said the King. “Simply ghastly.”
Lord Mountbatten’s valet, John Dean, agreed. “Prince Philip did not seem to have much in the way of civilian clothing,” he recalled. “His civilian wardrobe was, in fact, scantier than that of many a bank clerk…. I think he had to manage more or less on his naval pay. He did not bring much with him when he came to London, sometimes only a razor…. He did not have his own hairbrushes…. Either he was not too well looked after in the navy, or he was careless, for often he did not have a clean shirt.