The royals - Kitty Kelley [75]
“Philip was perfect for her, and she was blindingly in love with him,” said Gwen Robyns. “She was so young and unsure of herself as Queen. Very, very self-conscious as monarch. Painfully insecure. She did not know how to act or behave among so many people. But he was smooth and easy, more sophisticated. He’d jolly her into good humor, and warm her up for the crowds. She’d put on a grumpy face most of the time because she was overwhelmed, but he’d coax a smile out of her. He was disgusting to the press. ‘Here come the vultures,’ he’d say when he saw us. He threw peanuts at us in Malta, so we despised him, but we could see that he was truly marvelous for her. She brightened up around him. All he had to do was whisper in her ear and she glowed. Every time she was cross and sour, he charmed a laugh out of her. He made her look good. He really carried her on that trip.
“I remember in Australia when she was numbed into boredom by having to shake hundreds of sweaty hands in blistering 110-degree heat. She scowled and looked ugly until Philip turned and said, ‘Cheer up, sausage. It is not so bad as all that.’
“In New Zealand, the little Maori children were fairly jitterbugging with excitement to do their ‘party piece’ for her by jumping off the riverbank. But the Queen didn’t even look their way, and instead walked to her car. Philip saw what happened. ‘Look, Bet [diminutive for Lilibet],’ he said. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ The Queen turned and went back to look at the children.
“Philip was fiercely protective of her when her energy started flagging,” Gwen Robyns said. “He would leap to her side and wave off photographers, if he thought they were getting too close or might embarrass her. ‘Don’t jostle the Queen,’ he’d say. While he was great for her, he was boorish to others. I remember in South Australia the mayor of some little town was all got up in dreadful homemade robes of bunny rabbit fur to meet the Queen. He was about seventy years old, so sweet, so pathetic. He presented the Queen with a huge box, and in a quivering voice said: ‘Your Royal Highness’—poor thing, he was supposed to say Your Majesty—‘at this very moment, our Ambassador in London is presenting a similar box to your representative at the Palace.’
“ ‘Oh, my God, man,’ roared Philip. ‘Don’t you realize the ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between here and England? Your Ambassador is probably sound asleep right now.’
“The mayor wilted. He looked as if he’d been accosted. It was so sad to see him standing there in his sorry little costume, shaking and stammering apologies. ‘I should have thought of that,’ he said, berating himself. Here it was the day of his life and he’s crushed by the Duke of Edinburgh. Philip acted like a bastard.
“Naturally, I couldn’t report that kind of thing,” said Robyns, “or any other personal details. When I noticed that the Queen always took her shoes off, which seemed endearing and human, I noted in one of my dispatches: ‘The weary Queen slipped out of her shoes.’ I got a rocket from my editors saying, ‘Lay off the Queen. Buckingham Palace is furious with you.’ Another time I wrote that the Queen looked tired. We knew that she was bored stiff with the flags and bunting and all that red, white, and blue every time she turned around, so I wrote that she looked fatigued like the rest of us. Another rocket: Lay off the Queen. So I had to stop reporting the human side of the tour….”
The vigilant Palace tried to protect the Queen from herself. “They wanted to hide her human side—or what there was of it,” said the Daily Telegraph’s Maurice Weaver. “I remember a royal visit to Papua New Guinea when the Queen was watching the natives perform a dance in their grass skirts. They were wearing circular necklaces made out of bones and twigs and strange coins. She turned to her equerry. ‘I feel these people need my effigy on their coins.’ So he rounded