Authors: Harold Robbins
“Right after the engagement was announced, I went off to Australia for ten days with my mother and stepfather. I pined for him, called him every day, but he never returned the calls. Finally I got exasperated and asked his secretary if I had to make an appointment to speak to my fiancé. When I returned, one of his aides brought me a bouquet of flowers. No note attached.”
“This was right after you got engaged?”
“Yes. It made me wonder if I wasn’t making a mistake. I spoke to my mother and father and to my friends and the opinion was universal that the prince was very busy and I was being overly sensitive. Do you think I was being too sensitive?”
“You were nineteen years old and in love. I don’t think it’s being too sensitive to want your fiancé to shower you with love.”
“I ended up being the one to apologize for him not calling me. It always came down to that, that he would do something that got me upset and I would show my displeasure and end up begging his forgiveness. I was so confused, I thought that it was just me, that I was immature and didn’t understand how more worldly people acted. They stuck me away in Buckingham Palace to prepare for the wedding—you know, select the gown and jewelry and my wardrobe and all that. It would take months of preparation.”
“It must have been a very busy and hectic time.”
“Yes, it was, but I can’t tell you how alone I was there. The place was full of dead energy, like heavy air. It was so depressing. Instead of wild embraces with my lover, I was left alone when I wasn’t being measured and sized. I felt like I had been locked up in a museum. I found myself crying at night, lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. But it all paled in comparison to discovering there were three of us in the marriage.”
“Three of you?”
“My husband’s first love, and ultimately, I was to discover, his only true love.”
“An old girlfriend.”
“More than that, his soul mate, if his actions are to be judged. I suppose I was naive in that area. I didn’t have any boyfriends, so I had no one to compare him with. The woman is more than a friend, she’s his confidante. The fact that I was married to him and that she was married to someone else didn’t seem to bother the two of them.”
“Are you saying they kept up their relationship even after your marriage?”
“It wasn’t just a matter of keeping up their relationship—I don’t know when it actually became sexual, if that’s what you mean. It was the way she was shoved down my throat right from the beginning. I hadn’t twigged on to it before the marriage. I discovered very soon after the ceremony at St. Paul’s that my marriage was overcrowded.”
She handed Marlowe sheets of paper. “This is what I remember about my honeymoon. Some women would have enjoyed a boat trip with several hundred men, but to me it was the honeymoon from hell.”
In her room, Marlowe read the princess’s remembrances.
Royal Yacht
Britannia
I stood on the deck of the
Britannia
with the wind blowing in my face. It was late afternoon and we were off the warm coast of southern Spain. We had sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and were not far from that tall rock that rose from the sea and was such a bone of contention between the British and the Spanish. I leaned against the railing and closed my eyes, letting the late afternoon breeze caress me. My marriage was still only days old and this moment with Europe on one side and North Africa on the other was a rare moment when I could be alone with my thoughts since the majestic ceremony at St. Paul’s.
So many thoughts swirled in my head, I had a hard time concentrating. I was confused and distraught. My nerves were raw and I knew I showed my anxiety inappropriately, sometimes appearing irritated or even hiding my frayed nerves behind a giggle or loud laugh. I was terribly sick and tired and raw inside. The apprehension that began the day the prince asked me to marry him started as a dull worry and grew into a smothering ball of anxiety.
At first I hid my terrible fright behind nervous giggles with my girlfriends as we laughed in awe over the fact that I was to be the next queen of the Brits. “Oh, God, we’re going to have to curtsy to you when you’re queen, Duch! How will we keep from laughing!” they howled.
Duch was my nickname among my friends. I told the prince my close friends call me Duch, but he said that wasn’t dignified.
After he asked me to marry him, when I moved for a short time into Clarence House to be near the Queen Mother, before I moved into Buckingham Palace to prepare for the wedding, I was suddenly alone with my thoughts—and my fears. There had been no one to share them with. I couldn’t speak to the Queen Mother about the silly thoughts and fears swirling around my head. Ancient and revered, she was hardly human to me. Like Westminster and St. Paul’s, I thought of the Queen Mum as one of the nation’s historical treasures rather than the grandmother of my future husband. A grand lady, born at the turn of the century, for eight decades she had been an exemplary of British motherhood and refined social charm.
Her father was the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and she claimed descent from Robert I, the Bruce, King of Scotland. I thought that because her father, like mine, had been an earl, we would have common ground, with her teaching me about the Royals. But perhaps it was because of her advanced age, or the sixty-year difference in our ages—an eon of difference in terms of culture. The Queen Mum had lived her youth, young womanhood, and entire married life in a different world than I was born into. I was raised in the world of the sexual revolution, the Pill, the Beatles, the rise of feminine consciousness and battle for women’s rights. It was a far different world than the one in which the Queen Mum had helped rule Britain. She gave me little guidance as to what my role would be. I suspect that she had spent so much of her life as a Royal, she had hardly known life outside the palace.
My moment of tranquillity was interrupted by a ship’s steward.
“His Royal Highness requests your presence in the salon, ma’am,” he said. “He would like you to bring your diary.”
I tried to smother a sigh, but it slipped out like so many of my emotions, I was so fragile at the time. The summons sounded like my employer asking me to bring my dictation pad. And he literally had. My diary was my schedule of appointments. Before the wedding, it had mostly been filled with parties and hair and nail appointments. Now I would have “official” duties, but it was also scary because I had no idea of how I was to act, what I was to say. I didn’t know even how I was to dress for the public.
I knew that I was a puzzlement to the ship’s crew. I often went into the royal galley and helped myself to bowls of ice cream and snacks. One time I overheard one of the cook staff ask if I had a tapeworm. It wasn’t the first time I had puzzled the servants with my eating habits.
How can you eat so much between meals and still be so slim?
was always the spoken—and more often unspoken—question.
It wasn’t possible to tell them that I had my own secret formula for weight loss. I made almost as many trips to the loo to disgorge the food as I did into the kitchen. I had learned that by vomiting out what I consumed, I could temporarily satisfy my urge to eat while remaining slim. I had started a vomiting-after-meals routine several months earlier when the prince said that I was looking a bit thick in the waist. It was a not-too-subtle hint that he wanted me to look the very best for our wedding. It was a wedding that would be beamed around the world by satellite. I knew I had to please him, that he, the queen, and millions of people expected me to look dazzling for the ceremony.
There was nothing wrong with the way I was losing weight, really, but people were funny about such things, so I kept it a secret after I had gotten a strange look from one of my friends when I mentioned that I had discovered a surefire way to keep off the pounds. It certainly worked well, though I found myself bingeing more frequently, needing a quick fix of something sweet and tasty and then depositing my stomach contents in the loo. What people didn’t understand was that my body wasn’t perfect. If I let up for a moment, I began to look fat and bloated. That made me angry about myself, but I had to keep my wool on and not show my anger to other people.
Food was not my problem, of course, it was something else. I found myself more and more depressed. Gobbling down a bowl of ice cream or a candy bar helped get rid of the feelings, the anxieties, that overwhelmed me. It helped, but soon I felt depressed again. Sometimes I felt like I had no control over my life.
First it was my family. The thing about marrying the prince was a big thing, of course, especially with my father. I wanted to please him. I never really was tops with him—I mean, I know he loves me, but I don’t think he really respected my intellect. My friends say that it’s the same with their fathers, that it’s a male thing, especially with older men, because the society they were raised in only tolerated women maintaining the house and wifely chores in the bedroom. Now that I was a princess, I hoped he was really proud of me.
Crazy thoughts always seemed to creep into my mind. Sometimes I wondered if it was all worth it, you know, trying to please everyone, wanting approval, needing love. A girlfriend at school whose mother killed herself told me that her mother used to say there were worse things than being dead, that at least then she would be able to get some peace.
Horrible.
That thought sent me into the kitchen for a quick fix before I got my diary. It had been so hard, these last few months. With all the excitement, all the attention, the newspeople following everywhere I went, people alternately showering attention on me and making demands for my time, sometimes I felt like I was in the middle of a big circle with people walking around me, all of them shouting, “Do this!” “Don’t do that!” “Jump this way!” “Jump that way!”
Getting through the marriage ceremony and going on a honeymoon had not brought that big sigh of relief that everyone said it would. I cried my eyes out. This was not the honeymoon I dreamt of during those years after puberty when my hormones suddenly were screaming that I was a young woman with desires and sexual urges. I dreamt of beaching a small sailboat on a paradise isle with my new husband, of running naked on the deserted beach, making love on the warm sand with gentle ocean waves licking at our feet—
After the ceremony, we had brunch at Buckingham Palace, a place as warm and cozy as the British Museum. And as emotional as the mineral exhibit in the museum. The faces around the table were polite and unemotional, welcoming me into the family not with tears and grins but with reserve and courtesy, as if I were a new piece of furniture added to the royal family’s collection.
My God, I felt that need to love and be loved right down to my toes. The first three days of the honeymoon were spent at a palatial estate with staff and servants hovering about. Now I was aboard a honeymoon vessel, but rather than a cozy sailboat, it was a royal yacht the size of a battleship and crewed by nearly three hundred men. I would rather have taken a Caribbean cruise ship over the
Britannia.
At least there would have been dancing and entertainment, people to laugh and talk with, a shipboard casino, shops, and tacky little tourist destinations to complain about.
Instead of love on a warm beach or a fun cruise, I felt as if I had been sent on a mission with the Royal Navy. I didn’t even have the foresight to bring along anything to read, not even one of those romantic blouse-rippers I enjoy. The prince, however, brought several of his philosophy books along. I wondered why he would want to spend his time with boring books instead of being with me.
Last night, he had wanted to discuss passages from the South African philosopher Van der Post. “Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child,” he said. “What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“I haven’t the faintest,” I told him. And my tone said I didn’t care, either.
He rolled over and read with his back to me. I was angry and humiliated. I wanted to cuddle up to him and have him tell me how much he loved me. Instead, I felt that if I wasn’t interested in the Big Questions in life, those found in books by people who sit in front of the fireplace and drink brandy while they discuss endless philosophies of life, that I had no value. There are better things to do and talk about. It’s not difficult to fathom that my husband and I walked different paths when it came to subjects like philosophy.
I know I must come across like a silly shopgirl. My new husband is one of the preeminent men in the free world. But I have never pretended to be an intellectual genius. I never pretended to be anything but who I am. I saw women around me trying to please him and gain his attention by focusing in on his interests as if they shared them, women who were bored silly by polo but name-dropped famous players. I was unable to fake it. I am just who I am and it is very discouraging to be constantly made to feel that whatever I am is not good enough, that I have to be someone else. I am perfectly aware that he relates on all levels to his old girlfriend, from polo to the hunt—no doubt she has read the philosopher’s books.
I lay in bed after he turned his back on me and fumed. A rage grew in me. Unable to resist an urge to eat, I took a candy bar from where I had them stored in the bottom drawer of the end table. Then I ate another. I had a tremendous urge to rush to the galley and get a big bowl of ice cream, but I smothered it. Feeling bloated after I satisfied myself, I rushed into the bathroom and threw up.