The royals - Kitty Kelley [44]
On the day of the wedding, the bridegroom, suffering from a cold, swore off cigarettes at the request of the bride and promised never to smoke again. He arrived at the church early with his best man, who later wrote that both of them were so hung over from the previous night’s bachelor party that they had had to steady their nerves with a gin and tonic.
The jokes had been rough and the drinking serious that evening, particularly after Vasco Lazzolo, a portrait painter, who was convinced that Philip was marrying Princess Elizabeth to advance himself, rose unsteadily from his chair to propose a toast. He lifted his brandy glass and glared at the guest of honor. “For what you are doing, I think you are an absolute shit,” he said. He threw his glass into the fireplace and lurched from the room.
“That was quite a party,” recalled Larry Adler many years later, “and Philip certainly didn’t enjoy it as much as the rest of us. He was just too scared. I remember him looking white as a ghost and shaky the whole evening. He was damned frightened. The King had laid down the law to him about a lot of things, from fast cars to other women.
“Philip had had a minor automobile accident shortly after the engagement announcement which made the papers. He was driving fast, skidded, hit a hedge, and banged himself up a bit. This caused excessive press comment at the time and made him look like a reckless, pub-crawling playboy. Naturally, the King was annoyed. Then there was the Helene Cordet affair, which surfaced right before the wedding, when she was described in the French press as the ‘mystery blond divorcée’ whom Philip had visited in Paris the year before. Since then, Helene is always the first name mentioned as one of Philip’s mistresses and the mother of his illegitimate children. Of course, he and Helene claim that they’re merely childhood friends who grew up together in Paris. He gave her away when she married the first time in 1938, and he’s godfather to both her children, so who knows?”
Adler smiles and shrugs when talking about his old friend’s relationship with Helene Cordet, who worked in a Paris dress shop before moving to London to open a nightclub and become a cabaret singer. Her parents, staunch Greek royalists, had helped support Philip’s parents during their exile in France when Philip was growing up. “Mercifully, he spared us the personal details of his relationship with Helene,” said Adler in 1992. “But we made certain assumptions at the time, and whether we were right or wrong, we understood why the King was agitated about his daughter falling in love with a bounder like our old pal. As I told Philip then, be glad your zipper can’t talk.”
Despite his friends’ insinuations, Philip stayed married to Elizabeth, but he conducted discreet affairs with many other women, most of whom were aristocrats or actresses. One mistress reportedly bore his child as a single woman and never divulged the name of the child’s father. Her refusal to name the man whipped up more rumors. By 1989 the stories of Philip’s alleged illegitimate children forced Helene Cordet’s son, Max, to make a public statement.
“I have heard these rumors all my life, but they are ridiculous,” he said. “My father—my real father—[Frenchman Marcel Boisot] lives in Paris and it is silly to say otherwise. This all goes back to my mother’s childhood with Philip. Nothing more to it than that.”
His mother admitted that Philip paid for her son’s tuition at Gordonstoun, but she said it was because she was destitute, not because Philip was her son’s father. By then, though, the rumors, repeated for so many years, carried their own currency.
“I don’t care what Max Boisot says now,” said his classmate James Bellini in 1994. “I went to Cambridge with him and we all thought then that he was one of Philip’s bastards. We talked about it all the time. Before Cambridge, Max attended Gordonstoun, the same school in Scotland that Philip attended and to which he sent his