Authors: Harold Robbins
“Well, I … I think that you’re not really asking me what I think of you, but rather seeking some kind of approval.”
The princess clutched her coffee cup tightly with both hands and looked Marlowe directly in the eye. “Why do you say that?”
“My feeling is that you tend to seek approval from others. I suspect it’s related to your belief that you were a disappointment to your family, starting with that business of not being a boy.”
“Do I come across as someone who is buttering up people because I need their pats? Like a puppy dog brushing up against one’s leg?”
Marlowe didn’t want her answer to be unkind or dishonest, but she also didn’t want to lie. She chose her words slowly and carefully, not quite sure what the princess’s reaction would be. “You come across as someone who is kind and considerate, witty and spirited, with your greatest strength lying in people skills rather than academic skills.” She let that sink in for a moment and then added, “But you also come across as someone who is overly concerned about what other people think of you. Now, you can beat yourself with a horsehair whip or we can go on with our discussions about your past.”
The princess’s jaw worked for a moment as she struggled with an impulse to blow at Marlowe—then she burst into a loud laugh.
“I see why you have Trent and his lot in a tither. You are blunt, aren’t you?”
“I have to be, in my profession. Would you prefer I lie?”
“No, that’s what they’re doing, or if not that, at least not telling me all the truth.”
Marlowe wasn’t surprised at her answer. She didn’t dislike Trent, she hardly knew the man, but she didn’t quite trust him, either.
“They think I’m erratic, hiring you and all that. They’re worried I might fire them and hire another firm. Wouldn’t that take the air out of their tires, being booted off the case?”
“I’m sure it would.” She took out the pad of paper with her notes on it. “Let’s continue where we left off yesterday. You were eighteen and had moved into your first apartment in London.”
“Right. The flat was my coming-of-age present from my parents, physically coming of age, not mentally, of course,” she said with a smile. “But anyway, there I was, eighteen and all on my own in London. I was looking forward to it. I invited three of my girlfriends to share my flat with me. I suppose you can say that I had a quiet life in that first year on my own. I didn’t smoke or drink and wasn’t into partying. Read those romances I get criticized so much for, watched a bit of telly, sat around and talked to friends. The people I related with were pretty much out of the same coop.”
“Formal, restrained, rich?” Marlowe asked.
“Yes, but there’s also something called breeding. I suppose a psychologist would say we were trained like puppy dogs to all bark alike. We dressed pretty much alike, nothing extravagant unless someone special appeared in our lives, dated the same sort of men, clean-cut, well mannered, although I really wasn’t into dating. It was considered to be vulgar to be pretentious or ostentatious.”
“What did you do for fun?”
“Girl things, I suppose, maybe even silly things sometimes. We might ring up people with funny names and crack a joke about it or go out and ring doorbells in the dead of night. If a boy let us down by not showing up for a date or not treating us with the respect we demanded, we would throw eggs and flour on his car. You look a bit puzzled. Didn’t you do things like this when you were young?”
“Not beyond the age of twelve.”
“Is that what I did? Acted like a juvenile? I suppose they were silly things, now that I think about it.”
“I’m not judging you, I’m still trying to understand you so I can explain you to a jury. Actually, the things you did sound like harmless fun. They remind me of friends who live in a farm community in Utah and whose children go to barn dances and hay rides. What you described is a joy of innocence you rarely see today among young people. Teenagers nowadays know more about drugs, sex, and rock and roll than naive pranks.”
“What did you do when you were eighteen?”
“I was working as a waitress in a greasy spoon.”
“Why a waitress?”
“It’s a job a woman can get when she doesn’t have training for anything else. It’s not easy, you’re on your feet for eight hours, taking flak from customers and the cook, putting up with people who think their three-dollar special should taste like pheasant under glass, warding off men with wandering hands, letting them know they better keep them in their pockets if they still want to have all their fingers but not so firmly that it kills a tip.”
“It sounds perfectly horrid.”
“It’s survival when you need it.”
“When you don’t get a three-bedroom flat for your coming-out present, is that what you mean?”
“We came from different backgrounds. If I had your upbringing, I’m sure I would have been one of those girls getting an apartment.”
“I was an immature girl doing silly things while I waited to get married and be taken care of for the rest of my life—that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” The princess held up her hands to ward off Marlowe’s protest. “I’m sorry, I’ll go on. There I was, eighteen, and as my swim instructor would have put it, I was treading water rather than completing laps. But they were happy times, thinking back now, the happiest I’ve ever had. I even took a cooking class. My mother encouraged it. I suppose it was part of the finishing school I never finished. I learned how to make borscht and yummy chocolates and ended up with a few more pounds on me than when I started.”
“Did the added pounds bother you?”
“No, at that time it was just some extra weight, not something that dominated my life.”
“Did you have any future plans for life? Any game plan for finding a suitable husband?”
“Not really, I just knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I had to remain a virgin.”
Marlowe cleared her throat. “Well, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being a virgin before marriage, though it does sound a bit medieval, the husband showing the wedding guests the bloodstains on the sheets the next morning.”
“My God, that’s a dreadful thing to say. That isn’t at all what I meant.”
Marlowe shook her head. “We seem to be constantly on a collision course. I’ve interviewed dozens of women in cases and I’ve never acted like an ax murderer, but I seem to bludgeon you every time I open my mouth.”
“I feel there is something between us.”
“It’s just the formality and restraint of being British colliding with my brash Americanism. Sometimes when I’m in a restaurant district back home, like Chinatown or North Beach, I might knock on a café window and with hand signs ask the people sitting at the window table if the food is good. It works there, but when I tried that here last night, the people at the table just gaped at me through the window like I was crazy.”
“They probably thought you were a whore soliciting, don’t you think?”
“My God, I hope not. Okay, so you said you had to keep yourself tidy for what lay ahead. Did you expect to marry the prince?”
“No, of course not, how would I know he’d be attracted to me?”
“But you say you had to keep yourself tidy for what lay ahead. That’s an indication that you did not expect to lead an ordinary life.”
“I don’t quite agree that being a virgin is as medieval as you believe.”
“No, it’s not the virgin part I find puzzling, that’s just having good old-fashioned values. It’s the fact that you saw something out of the ordinary down the road.”
“I don’t follow you. I don’t see what that has to do with the case.”
“I’ve heard criticism that you came into the marriage with the romanticized notion of marrying the prince because of his position rather than for himself and that you became disenchanted when you discovered being married to him was no fairy tale come true. It’s a theme that the prosecutor will push, so we need to be prepared to deal with it.”
“It’s rubbish. It’s completely false. I did love him for himself. I may have had idealistic and, yes, even romanticized notions about love and marriage, but not about marrying a prince.” She was quiet, then said, “To a young girl reading a fashion magazine, the notion of dating a prince would be titillating. But you have to remember, I spent a lot of time in the sandbox with his two younger brothers.”
“But not your husband.”
“Obviously not—my husband was an adult when I was a little girl. But my point is that I was not infatuated with the notion of marrying a prince. Marrying a Royal would have been considered a good marriage by women of my background, but not an unheard-of one. The fact that he was the Prince of Wales and that I would be the next queen certainly entered my mind. Marriage is not something I would have entered without love.”
It was too great a leap of faith for Marlowe to believe that marrying a prince and becoming a queen wouldn’t be an earthshaking experience for any woman. “I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but we still have to deal with this issue because the prosecutor definitely will. You said you had to keep yourself tidy. Isn’t the implication that you wanted to be chosen as the prince’s bride? Why else would you keep yourself a virgin?”
“For my husband, whoever he might turn out to be.”
Marlowe finally got it—the innocent heroines in the romance novels that the princess read were
virgins
ravaged by dashing heroes. She wanted a fairy-tale marriage. It also struck her that in terms of the mores in which the princess was raised in, the woman’s sense of romance was completely unrealistic, not just old-fashioned but so fantastic, it was hard for Marlowe to comprehend how they got into the head of a young woman growing up during the turmoil and excesses of the sexual revolution. She wondered if the princess had also given thought beyond romance to the practical demands of being married to a prince.
“Were you aware of the responsibilities that came with marrying a prince, what role you would need to play?”
“Of course, yes, but I also thought I would get help from my husband and others in the system. What I wasn’t prepared for was all the sudden media attention. It was all very daunting—terrifying, really.”
“When did you first start interacting with your future husband?”
“I attended his thirtieth birthday party. I was just seventeen, but my sister had been dating him off and on for a couple of years. Following that, there was another social gathering a few months later. But it was at a barbecue at a country estate when I was turning nineteen that he took notice of me. We were seated on a bale of hay and I told him how forlorn he had looked the prior year when he had attended the funeral of Earl Mountbatten, his great-uncle who had been assassinated by the IRA. I told him that he had looked so lonely that he should have someone looking after him.”
“And what was his reaction?”
“Quite strange. He practically leaped on me, talking to me about how he felt about the earl’s death. After that, we began to date.”
“What was it like to date him?”
She giggled. “I had to call him ‘sir.’”
“Sir?”
“Well, you have to remember he was the heir to the throne. Besides being the Heir Apparent, he was Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Earl of Chester, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland. Isn’t that a mouthful?”
“Very impressive.”
“Even though we were dating, the formalities had to be maintained.” The princess cast her eyes downward and then looked up at Marlowe. “If you’re wondering whether our romance was fiery, I confess that the formalities had to be maintained there, too. We were not alone very often. He maintained a circle of close friends, there were always servants hovering around, and of course the Royal Protection officers lurk about.”
“Tell me about his friends.”
“Frankly, I found them intimidating. All of them were older than me, of course. I always had the impression that they had little respect for me as a person, for my opinions. They were better educated than me, but that did not make them better people.”
“You didn’t like his friends?”
“They didn’t accept me as an intellectual equal, they treated me like I was the prince’s toy. They would name-drop people and concepts knowing that I wouldn’t be familiar with them. It was done very subtly and was humiliating. No, I didn’t like them, they were always over the prince like a bad rash and condescending toward me, but they were tame compared to the newshounds.
“The media people—the rat pack, as I call them—were animals, the hounds of hell constantly snapping at my heels. They came at me from all angles, recording my every move. I had no peace. I couldn’t leave the house without the camera rolling. They even rented a flat across the street from mine that would give them a view of my bedroom window. I can’t tell you what it was like. They got on top of buildings and peered over fences with binoculars, hired helicopters to spy on me when I was on a country estate, hurtled questions at me constantly, shouting them at me every time I stepped outside. One moment I was a nineteen-year-old egg-and-flouring a boy’s car for standing me up on a date, and the next I was an international phenomenon. I tried to be nice, answered questions in the hopes they would leave me alone, but nothing helped. They really didn’t want ordinary pictures, what they wanted was to catch me doing something compromising. Even scratching my nose was a sensation.”
“You didn’t get any help from anyone?
“No, no guidance from anyone, neither in dealing with the newshounds nor in the Royals’ quirky traditions. I was invited to Balmoral, the Queen’s castle in Scotland, and I knew nothing about how to act. One poor guest was yelled at just for trying to sit in a chair last sat in by Queen Victoria.
“My husband was not a receptive person toward other people’s weaknesses. He had not been brought up to be empathetic. He was strong himself. He had to be, being the crown prince was not an easy job, whether it was some bully at school who wanted to be able to say he knocked him off his feet or an IRA assassin who wanted to put a bullet in his head. I soon found that I was on my own and I didn’t know how to handle it.