The royals - Kitty Kelley [82]
“Prince Philip came into the drawing room,” recalled Myrah Wernher Butter, who has known him since childhood. “He was white as a sheet. I asked him what was the matter, but he just walked across the room and poured himself a drink, which was very unusual for him. Years later Charles was telling me about what he felt when he sent his son off to school. I told him I understood. He said, ‘Oh, that’s because you always cared so much. I bet no one ever cared that much about me.’ So I told him the story about his father. He was stunned. He just couldn’t believe it.”
By the time Charles was ready to start school in 1956, his father was fed up. He was tired of fighting the Palace guard, especially for his wife’s time and attention. He disliked the courtiers—he called them “old farts”—and resented his wife’s dependence on them. She no longer consulted him on court matters, and her passivity to his suggestions infuriated him. “Come on, Lilibet. Come on,” he would snap. “Just do it. Do it.” Exasperated with Palace bureaucracy, he started spending more time with his pals from the Thursday Club. This only hardened the courtiers’ opinion of him as a crude adolescent with a predilection for lavatory humor.
“The Duke of Edinburgh is very lewd, very Germanic,” said one of the Queen’s private secretaries. The haughty courtier attributed “Philip’s vulgar German preoccupation with nudity” to his “Mountbatten origins.” He cited the photographs that Lord Mountbatten had posed for with Cary Grant in Las Vegas. In the first picture, the two men faced the camera surrounded by gorgeous showgirls swathed in feather boas. In the second picture, the men turned their backs to the camera and so did the show girls, whose rhinestoned-thonged backsides were without feathers. Mountbatten found the picture of the bare-bottomed showgirls so amusing that he had it blown up and hung in the Queen’s passageway on the royal yacht. Philip, who roared with laughter when he saw it, enjoyed showing it off and would not remove it, even for state guests. “That’s his Germanic idea of art and entertainment—naked buttocks,” said the courtier.
Philip started sharing the London apartment of actor Richard Todd with two other married men during afternoons to entertain young actresses. The three men called themselves “the Three Cocketeers.”
“No, I can’t talk about what went on in that apartment,” said British actor Jack Hedley in 1993. “It’s too dangerous to talk about those days—even forty years later.”
Philip also used his equerry’s flat on South Street. “Mike, or Parker-from-the-Palace, as we called him—that’s how he always introduced himself on the phone—was living another life away from his wife and his family, and the parties at his flat were rousing affairs,” recalled one man who attended many of the parties. “Yes, Philip was always there and he always had women, but nothing serious. As the French say, les danseuses, which are a rich man’s indulgence. Philip usually came with Parker and Baron Nahum, the court photographer, known by his first name. One night, Aristotle Onassis brought Maria Callas to dinner, and another night Prince Bernhard, married to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, spent a riotous evening with us.”
“I remember the dinner with Prince Bernhard,” recalled Larry Adler. “That’s when we all realized how much Philip hated his job as Consort. Throughout dinner Philip kept jabbing at Bernhard: ‘Boy, I really envy you,’ he said. ‘You can go anywhere you like and not be recognized. You can have all the girlfriends