The royals - Kitty Kelley [45]
While Philip had been intimate with many women before his marriage, his relationship with Helene Cordet was never the passionate love affair that was alleged. She publicly denied having a romance with Philip, but her coy denials seemed calculated toward publicity to launch her career as a London cabaret singer. She later cashed in on her relationship with Philip by writing a book entitled Born Bewildered. She intimated that she had not been invited to the royal wedding because she was the “mystery blonde” he had been romancing in Paris. Helene was not invited because she was divorced, and at that time, divorced persons were not allowed in royal circles.
Years later, Helene’s granddaughter told her to stick to the story of the affair with the Queen’s husband. “Don’t keep denying that you and Philip had more than a friendship going,” said her granddaughter. “I like people thinking I’m royal and Philip is my grandfather.”
Elizabeth, a virgin when she married, was the pampered, protected daughter of Puritan parents, whereas Philip, the son of separated parents, was reared by relatives who had been exposed to an atmosphere of decadence and amorality. Elizabeth had grown up with the comforting scent of Palace beeswax and fresh roses, while Philip was accustomed to the itinerant smell of mothballs from borrowed clothes in storage bins and battered suitcases hastily packed and unpacked. The twenty-six-year-old bridegroom, who had traveled through Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, was marrying a twenty-one-year-old woman who had never been outside Great Britain until the royal family tour of South Africa. Poorly educated, she had never attended school and received hourly tutorials only in British history and heraldry. She had studied Walter Bagehot’s writings on the monarchy and had mastered the hereditary peerage with all its complex titles of antiquities. She spoke excellent French* but barely understood mathematics and science and knew little about the natural world beyond dogs and horses. She disliked poetry, except for the rhymes of Rudyard Kipling and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The only poem she ever memorized was the childish verses of “They’re Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace” by A. A. Milne.
“I was never able to imbue her with enthusiasm for modern verse,” said her governess, Marion Crawford. “ ‘Oh, do stop!’ she would say while I was reading from the works of some modern poet. ‘I don’t understand a word of it. What is the man trying to say?’ ”
Outside the Palace, Elizabeth felt self-conscious about the gaps in her education. She once asked if Dante was a horse, because she had never heard of the medieval poet.
“No, no, he isn’t a horse,” was the reply.
“Is he a jockey, then?” she asked.
She blushed when told that Dante Alighieri was the Italian classicist who wrote The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of world literature. Horses were what she knew best.
Elizabeth’s husband-to-be was neither a prodigy nor a scholar, but he at least had accumulated twelve years of formal schooling, plus several years of naval training, and he never experienced her hesitation in talking to people. With confidence bordering on arrogance, he could walk into a room without introduction, breezily announce himself, and approach the prettiest girl to say, “Well, this is a much more attractive audience than the one I’ve just left.” Philip chatted with anyone about anything, while Elizabeth worried constantly about what to say. “If only I could do it as well as my mother does it,” she said.
Receiving lines made her uncomfortable as she tried to manufacture small talk. Faced with a moment of silence, she once said, “Well… I can’t think of anything more to say about that.