The royals - Kitty Kelley [76]
“I filed a light story about the whip-around for the Queen and how we had to rustle up some coins. When the equerry found out, he banged on my hotel door in the middle of the night and demanded that I spike the story.
“ ‘It makes the Queen look poor,’ he said.
“ ‘Oh, rubbish,’ I said. ‘It’s a frothy little piece, and besides, no one expects the Queen to be carrying money.’ ”
He said he had not written the real story, which was the Queen’s pathetic noblesse oblige mentality about her poor benighted natives. So the froth stood. But he learned how sensitive the Palace was to the Queen’s press coverage. “We were not allowed to write anything other than what the Queen wore and how she looked,” he said. “The Palace press secretary would come out and feed us a description of Her Majesty in her green tulle gown, and we dutifully took it all down and reported it that way….”
As the Queen became more secure in her role, the Palace press office relaxed, but only slightly. “There’s an unwritten agreement,” said journalist Phillip Knightley, who accompanied the Queen on her first royal tour. “It’s as if the Palace said, ‘You need us to bring in your readers, most of whom love royal stories. We need you to tell the Queen’s subjects what she’s up to and what a wonderful person she is. So you can write anything you like about the royals—as long as you don’t question the actual institution of the monarchy.’ ”
Yet a soupçon of deference was expected. In New Zealand only the American press could get away with mentioning the Queen’s grammatical error. She had overheard two little girls arguing whether she was Queen Elizabeth or Princess Margaret. One said, “I tell you, it’s Princess Margaret.” The other said, “Is not. Is not. It’s the Queen.” With what Newsweek described as a “cavalier disregard for the Queen’s English,” the sovereign leaned over to the little girls and said: “No, it’s me.”
After years of travel the Queen eventually learned to carve a way for herself, but with great effort. “She was always proper, but never warm and ingratiating,” said Gwen Robyns. “Still, stilted, and remote, she held herself at a distance so she would never make a mistake, never put a foot wrong. She was so insecure that that was the only way she could handle her role. She’s not a woman who lights up in public like her mother, who on the surface is all bonnets, smiles, and feathers but underneath is steel—cold, hard steel with a marshmallow casing.”
Despite obvious discomfort in the spotlight, the young sovereign starred in no fewer than three films that were spun out of the royal tour. Six months after leaving London, she returned home to a rapturous welcome from her subjects, who lined the riverbanks as she sailed up the Thames on the royal yacht, Britannia. They understood that she would never be the crowd-pleasing actress her mother was, but they still appreciated her solid commitment to duty. They roared their approval as the royal yacht approached, and the Queen acknowledged their cheers with a stiff little wave. She, too, knew how lacking she was compared with her charismatic mother. Like her stolid father, she depended on an appealing spouse. She later acknowledged as much to close friends when she paid tribute to her husband. “Without Philip,” she said, “I could not have carried on.”
EIGHT
The monarchy was a distant train that had been bearing down on Elizabeth since she was ten years old. Growing up, she always heard it approaching. She knew that one day she would have to climb aboard; she never dreamed it would arrive so soon. At age twenty-five she was in a marriage just starting to bloom.
Before her father’s death forced her onto the throne, she had looked forward to being a wife and mother. After marrying, she said she wanted to have four children and devote herself to her family.
In the early years of her marriage, when faced with a choice between being a wife or mother, she always chose to be a wife. Her husband was her first priority—then. Before her son was