The royals - Kitty Kelley [96]
“Tony didn’t know if he was Arthur or Martha,” said the British novelist Una-Mary Parker. “We’re not talking Adam and Eve; we’re talking Adam and Steve.”
“Not so,” said one of Tony’s Cambridge classmates. “I’d say he was more bisexual than homosexual. He’d never limit himself.”
Another said, “Let’s just put that subject under what Sir Osbert Sitwell called an enormous tolerance for the untoward or eccentric.”
A few weeks before the wedding, Tony announced the name of his best man, and the press pounced like cats on a mouse. They reported that the best man, who was married, had been convicted of a homosexual offense eight years earlier.
“Prince Philip went wild. Tony was a little too swish for his taste anyway, what with his scarlet velvet capes and his long-haired friends who wore beards instead of shoes,” said a friend. “But when Tony announced that Jeremy Fry was to stand up for him at his wedding, the Duke of Edinburgh exploded. Fry was flagrantly homosexual.”
So, under pressure, Tony withdrew Fry’s name, and the Palace quickly announced that the young man had come down with a case of jaundice and would be unable to take part in the wedding. A few days later Tony chose Jeremy Thorpe to be his best man, but Scotland Yard investigators informed the Palace that Thorpe might be the target of homosexual blackmail and, obviously, not an acceptable choice. The Queen’s courtiers informed Tony that his friend could not be allowed to stand up for him in Westminster Abbey in the presence of royalty. Again Tony was forced publicly to retreat.
Because this would be the first royal wedding televised, the Palace insisted that a proper image be presented. The courtiers, whose responsibility was to protect the Crown from scandal, worried that people might think the Queen condoned “degenerate” behavior if she allowed a known homosexual to be part of the royal wedding party.
“Ridiculous, I know,” said a friend of Tony’s many years later, “especially since most of the royal household has always been homosexual, to say nothing of the aristocracy and the clergy; but that’s how prickly the Palace was about the issue in 1960.”
Tony was summoned to the Palace for a hurried meeting with the Queen’s courtiers. Hours later they announced that the third choice for Tony’s best man would be Dr. Roger Gilliatt, son of the Queen’s surgeon-gynecologist. He was married to the magazine editor Penelope Gilliatt, for whom Tony occasionally had worked. He was hardly a close friend, as Gilliatt acknowledged. “Armstrong-Jones seems like a nice chap,” he said, “but I don’t know him very well.”
Parchment wedding invitations engraved with the words “The Lord Chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is commanded by Her Majesty to invite…” were sent from Clarence House to two thousand people. The Palace did not release the names for fear of press inquiries regarding the marital status of some of the guests. The bridegroom’s father and both his former wives, plus their husbands, were included in the guest list. Meanwhile the bride’s disgraced uncle, the Duke of Windsor, and his twice divorced wife were pointedly excluded. “Ah, well, perhaps there’ll be a funeral soon,” said the Duchess of Windsor, blithely trying to bat aside the continued royal ostracism. Poking fun at herself, she added, “At least they can’t say I haven’t kept up with the Joneses.”
As the only royal dynasty to stake its claim to the throne on its opposition to divorce, the House of Windsor could no longer preserve the pretense that divorce barred participation in royal events. Few people realized it at the time, but this royal wedding lowered the divorce barrier forever.
“They changed the guard at Buckingham Palace last night,” observed the Daily Mail in describing the theatrical wedding guests who sat in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey: playwright Noel Coward, ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, movie star Leslie Caron, and actress Margaret Leighton. The newspaper listed the names of actors,