The royals - Kitty Kelley [91]
In January 1960 Lord Mountbatten had staged an elaborate wedding for his younger daughter, Lady Pamela, to interior decorator David Nightingale Hicks. Mountbatten invited all the crowned heads of Europe to make sure his daughter’s wedding was as colorful and splendid as a royal wedding, prompting the press to describe him as “almost royal.” Future Prime Minister Harold Wilson described him as “the Shop Steward of Royalty,” but his future son-in-law said that Mountbatten was insecure about his status. “The trouble with Dickie,” said David Hicks, “was that in spite of his brilliant achievements, he never really knew who he was. He wasn’t a member of the aristocracy; he had royal blood, but he wasn’t fully accepted in the royal family, so he held a peculiar position that somehow left him very insecure.”
At first Mountbatten had been dismayed that his daughter wanted to marry a commoner whom he considered far beneath her rank and station. For his own pride, Mountbatten wanted her to make a more illustrious marriage like her sister’s. In 1946 he had persuaded his older daughter, Patricia, his acknowledged favorite* and the one for whom he had secured his title,† to marry John Knatchbull, a strapping aristocrat who was Baron Brabourne. Mountbatten was proud to claim this man as his son-in-law; he was not at all pleased with the prospect of an impecunious interior decorator.
“David’s effeminate profession, plus his sexual preferences, bothered Lord Mountbatten,” said his former secretary John Barratt. “But he recognized that Pammy was already thirty years old and on the cusp of spinsterhood. She had never been proposed to before, so he tried to accept the situation and make the best of it.”
Mountbatten’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, agreed that Hicks† was not Mountbatten’s idea of the perfect son-in-law. “An interior decorator,” wrote Ziegler, “was not what he would have chosen as a recruit for his family.”
“The English aristocracy are so two-faced about sexuality,” said the writer Gwen Robyns. “It was absolutely hypocritical for Mountbatten, supposedly an old queen himself, or at least bisexual, to object to David Hicks. David never lied about himself or his boyfriends. He’s always been quite open, and Pammy’s very accepting of the men in his life.
“I came to know Pammy and David quite well when I worked with him on a book about decorating,” said the writer. “I dined with them many times, and there was always a beautiful young boy in attendance. I met several of David’s boyfriends, and even interviewed them when I was writing his biography.* I do remember asking Pammy once how she could put up with all the men. And she said, ‘Gwen, if you had parents like mine, you can put up with anything. Besides, David is a very good father and he’s very nice to me. He runs the house, he orders the food, and he picks out all my clothes.’
“David told me that he was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1959,” continued the writer. “A friend told him the only solution was to marry an heiress, but David didn’t know any heiresses, so his friend invited him to a party to meet a few. That night David was taking his mother to the movies—he was living with his mother at the time. He left her in the car for a few minutes while he ran in to his friend’s party to scout heiresses. Enter Lady Pamela Mountbatten. David didn’t waste a second.
“ ‘I saw an estate of five million pounds walk through the door in white peep-toe shoes and the worst white pocketbook you’ve ever seen,’ he told me. ‘I immediately took her in my arms to dance and whispered, ‘How many babies do you want?’ Naturally, Pammy, who had never been courted before and was in danger of never getting married, was enchanted. She told me she went home and told her mother, who was pleased for her but rather puzzled.
“ ‘That’s wonderful, darling,’ said Edwina, an heiress who inherited generations of heirlooms and never purchased furniture in her life. ‘But what’s an interior designer?’ ”
After conferring with the Queen