The royals - Kitty Kelley [89]
Americans were entranced by the royal visit. The Chicago Tribune hailed the Queen as “a charming little lady,” and the Louisville Courier-Journal described her as an English rose “with a little of the morning dew still on the petal.” Waiters and cabdrivers gathered at street corners to cheer her limousine, and the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives was so excited to see her that he hollered, “Howdee-do, ma’am.” Women were captivated when she attended her first football game and appeared bewildered by men’s passion for the sport. She didn’t understand the concept of downs, or why the two teams huddled. “Why do they gather that way?” she asked. “Why are the goalposts behind the lines at the ends of the field? Why does one man leave the huddle first?” Pointing to the scoreboard, she asked what the numbers meant, and as the game dragged on, she inquired, plaintively but sweetly, “What is the duration of the game?”
Warren Rogers, the Associated Press reporter, who filed several stories a day during the state visit,* encountered further static from the British Embassy press office when he reported that Her Majesty and Gina Lollobrigida shared the same corsetiere. “The brassieres made for Gina were designed to maximize,” recalled Rogers, “but those for the Queen, who had the same kind of prominent bosom, were designed to minimize. I wrote that this was the difference between movie stars and royalty. But I was taken to task by the British press officer for even mentioning the Queen’s Hanoverian bosom. He said in oh, so lofty terms that I had crossed the line, even for a brash American. I had not demonstrated the proper amount of deference. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘the Crown nevah, evah, evah shows cleavage.’ ”
NINE
Royal weddings invigorate the monarchy. With all their pageantry, they pump energy into the ancient rituals. They provide an epic pageant that stirs emotions. The romantic procession of a princess bride in a glass coach drawn by prancing horses to an enchanted life of happily ever after has no equal outside fairy tales. The crash of military drums, the blare of trumpets, and the roar of cheering crowds entrance the country like a shower of shooting stars.
Swept up in the excitement, people unite to celebrate. And, not incidentally, businesses prosper as couturiers design hats and gowns; hotels book guests; restaurants cater parties; concessionaires produce gewgaws; and tourists spend freehandedly. Next to a coronation, nothing enchants the British like a royal wedding, and by 1960 the monarchy needed one.
Reverence for the Crown had slipped since the coronation, and traditional deference had been displaced by a new press curiosity. While still submissive to the Palace, British reporters were finally disclosing how much it cost taxpayers to maintain royalty. The 1959 bill for upkeep of the royal yacht, Britannia, the two airplanes in the Queen’s Flight, Prince Philip’s two Westland helicopters, the royal train, and the Queen’s four royal Rolls-Royces exceeded $1 million.
Reporters, far from being aggressive, were at least becoming more vigorous in covering the royal family. They still considered the sixty-year-old Queen Mother above reproach, so they rarely wrote a negative word about her, but they singed the Queen a few times for her lackluster style, her hidebound courtiers, her shaky marriage, and her absent (translation: philandering) husband.*
“What this family needs next year is a wedding,” the Queen Mother told her older daughter during the royal family’s 1959 Christmas holidays. She had consulted the court calendars to find the right time to announce Princess Margaret’s engagement. She had decided to give her younger daughter a full-blown wedding with all the royal flourishes. She knew that such a state occasion would revitalize the monarchy, but the Queen resisted. She feared that an extravagant wedding would only bring more criticism for spending taxpayers