by Jilly Cooper
‘I was reading the Sun in the dressing room the other day,’ said Gower, ‘when it suddenly burst into flames – not ignited by lust, but by Botham setting fire to it.’
In the field, Botham never leaves Gower alone, leaning on him, prodding him, teasing him like some vile child plaguing the life out of – once again – the endlessly good-natured labrador. If it came to the crunch, could the labrador control the vile child?
Talking to Gower, you become aware, too, of the alarming increase in Citadel Cricket, namely the growing isolation of the England team. Highly paid, hero-worshipped, paranoid because they may get dropped at any minute with a dramatic loss of income, constantly sniped at by the media, who regard every innings as a first night, the players have retreated into a tight little band, bitterly united against the encroaching outside world, particularly the selectors, the cricket commentators and the press.
As Gower points out: ‘If you’re shot at every time you go on to the field, you naturally draw closer to your colleagues. Even Brearley isn’t one of us any more. Once-you leave the cocoon of the England side, you miss out on the vital opinions of the dressing room.’ This alienation is not helped by the sullen gracelessness of Willis, nor the boorishness of Botham.
Gower as captain could give England back a much-needed image of cheerfulness and good manners. He has the diplomacy to bridge the growing gap between England and her critics. Fortunately, too, he has youth on his side. One returns to the Pears Soap image. David Gower is preparing to be a beautiful captain.
Princess Michael Of Kent
THE PRINCESS AND I had been friends for some years. The following piece, when it appeared in October 1986, was heavily cut by the Mail on Sunday, who also changed the phrase ‘occasionally she can be manipulative’, to ‘she can be very manipulative’, and headlined the piece ‘The Pushy Princess’. As a result, the Princess sent me thirty pieces of silver. Many people, however, accused me of flattering her to the point of sycophancy.
In 1979, shortly after her marriage, the new Princess Michael of Kent swept imperiously into a London bookshop and demanded a complete set of reference books.
‘What kind of reference books?’ stammered the assistant, somewhat taken aback.
‘The lot,’ said the Princess.
With characteristic gusto and Prussian efficiency, Princess Michael had embarked on a new career as an author.
Her book, due out on 9 October, will cause something of a sensation. Not only is it history at its most racily readable, but also reveals a great deal about the fascinating Princess herself and her tempestuous relationship with the Royal Family.
Recently I visited her at Kensington Palace, where she lives in a four-storey apartment with Prince Michael and their two children. Kensington Dallas, as it should be called, is a royal soap opera house – England’s answer to South Fork – which houses, in other apartments, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Princess Margaret, Princess Alice, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. And if the inhabitants don’t actually glower over the communal breakfast table like J.R. and Clayton Farlow, froideurs constantly develop because some princeling’s yells keep Princess Margaret awake, or one of Princess Michael’s cats uses Prince Charles’s bay tree tubs as an earthbox.
Pink roses, falling over an ancient wall, clashed with red and black lampposts topped with gold crowns. From open windows on all sides came the escalating yelp of different royal drinks parties. Princess Michael and I sat in her exquisite pastel rose-scented garden, drinking iced tea flavoured with cinnamon as her cats peered out of the lush green foliage like a Rousseau painting. Waving towards the ancient wall, Princess Michael announced that the Wales (as she airily calls Charles and Diana) lived next door.
‘Gimme a periscope,’ I muttered, expecting that at any minute Prince Harry’s football would fly over and scatter the perfection of the Iceberg roses. Did the Princess lob slugs that threatened her host as back over the wall when no one was looking? No she said reprovingly, she did not.
Five foot eleven, with strong Slav features, huge slanting sage-green eyes and thick streaked blond hair curling to her shoulders like Charles I, she is one of the most beautiful woman one will ever see. Perhaps to combat an over-Cavalier image, she was wearing a blue and white silk dress with a big white Puritan collar.
What had prompted her to write a book?
‘I used to be a very successful interior designer, but once I married Prince Michael I couldn’t be at the beck and call of clients ringing in the middle of the night about leaking roofs. Then I had to sue a client for payment, there was an awkwardness. I needed a project other than working for charity. What was there left for a mad princess to do decently? History seemed a safe subject.’
Sapphire and diamond rings caught the setting sun as she talked; the voice – husky, smoky, siren-soft – reminds one of Dietrich.
‘So I decided to write about eight famous ladies, including Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette, who married kings and emperors in other countries, and how they influenced and were treated by the countries they moved to. I also wanted to include the bits history books leave out: that Maria Carolina, for example, was married to a glove fetishist. She had only to caress her long gloved arms to bring her boorish husband, King Ferdinand, to heel; and that despite professing not to fancy him (he kept his boots on in bed), she bore him seventeen children. That’s an awful lot of hugger mugger,’ the Princess added wickedly.
‘I was also fascinated that Catherine the Great used a lady-in-waiting as a tester to try out possible new lovers, and had them medically checked as well. You can’t go round having one-night stands if you’re an empress.’
How would the Royal Family react to such salacious revelations?
‘The Queen’, said Princess Michael warmly, ‘has been endlessly supportive and given me access to the archives at Windsor. The Wales have been kind. But there will be jealousy from others,’ she added broodily.
Princess Michael, or Marie Christine, as she is known, has never really fitted into the English royal mould, which prefers understatement and gifted amateurism to a somewhat yuppy professionalism. She is too smart, too witty, too dazzlingly theatrical and, towering as she does over the rest of the Royal Family, too tall.
From the start, she seemed to revel too much in public engagements, and the public, even worse, reciprocated this enjoyment. When she turned on the Christmas lights in Stroud, near her Gloucestershire house, she was so radiant, according to a bemused local official, she lit up the whole town before she’d touched a single switch.
Marie Christine’s most difficult problem, however, is that because her husband, Prince Michael, is only a cousin of the Queen and a younger son to boot, he does not receive any salary from the Royal Purse. This seems very unfair when his elder brother, the Duke of Kent, gets £132,000 a year from the Queen, his sister Alexandra £125,800, and young Prince Andrew, on his marriage to Fergie, received a rise from £20,000 a year to £50,000.
Princess Michael is therefore in a Catch 22 situation. To make ends meet, she has continually to hustle for money; advising art galleries, seeking directorships for her husband, and now, she hopes, writing a best-selling book. The tragedy is that such hustling is frowned on as pushiness and commercialism by other members of the Royal Family, who are shored up by a fat salary from the Queen.
Princess’s Michael’s other great problem was that because Prince Michael’s parents were both dead, she had no in-laws to give her a helping hand. As a result there were gaffes. For her fortieth birthday, in 1985, for example, she was photographed stunningly in a strapless dress, her blond hair cascading over flawless shoulders. The more unscrupulous papers cropped the dress, so it appeared she was wearing nothing at all. Princesses do not strip. Royalty was not amused.
Staying at Windsor one Christmas where every one of the two hundred odd guests was falling over backwards to assure the Queen they were having a good time, she ruffled feathers by grumbling that her children’s nanny ha
d only a black and white television in her room. Worst of all, she got across her neighbour, Princess Margaret, not least perhaps because the press kept pointing out that Marie Christine was fulfilling public engagements more frequently and more gracefully.
Then in April 1985 real scandal struck, when a newspaper cruelly revealed that her father (whom Marie Christine hero-worshipped and always believed had spent the war in a concentration camp for defying the Nazis) had been a member of the SS, possibly the perpetrator of appalling atrocities. Amid the ensuing storm of publicity, Marie Christine braved Badminton Horse Trials the following weekend, where she was mobbed by the crowds. Standing beside her, I experienced at second hand the horror of being devoured by thousands of eyes and camera lenses avid for signs of distress. There were none. She was magnificent.
Later in 1985 it came out that her father had only been a token member of the SS (‘Rather like being in the guards,’ said one English peeress) and had done nothing discreditable. Public sympathy had swung right behind her, when suddenly another newspaper claimed that, disguising herself in a red wig, the Princess had been seeing a Texas oil millionaire. There is a tradition that royalty do not sue. With her back to the wall, the true professional, Princess Michael retired to her house in the country and finished her book.
Despite the fact that her crack lawyer, Sir David Napley, whom the Princess calls her ‘tame barracuda’ had advised her to deny that she identifies with any of the eight royal ladies she has written about, anyone reading the book will find understandable hurt and self-justification on almost every page.
The Princess herself has admitted that before every public appearance she prays: ‘Please God, let me not make a gaffe.’
But, writes Princess Michael, ‘While Marie Antoinette’s virtues frequently went unnoticed, every mistake – either political or personal – was seized on by her enemies . . . she was the victim of a vicious and shrewdly sustained process of character assassination . . . all her life criticism surrounded her.’
Again, Princess Michael could be describing herself and her own relationship with the Royal Family and the press when she writes about Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky, who married a Prussian prince: ‘She was vivacious, attractive and spontaneous, impulsive, generous, easy to hurt and envied by many. Nor was tact her strongest quality, though she later learnt from experience to bite her tongue . . . No matter how hard she tried . . . she clashed with Fritz’s family. Tittle-tattle about her spread.’
In her perfumed garden, the Princess poured more iced tea, steered a wasp away from one of her cats, and denied rather too forcefully that she’d ever had herself in mind when she wrote the book: ‘These eight women were real princesses, first ladies of their countries. They were the icing on the cake of political treaties, and when the treaties turned sour, the countries they’d moved to turned against the queens.’
In her introduction, Princess Michael has stated somewhat rashly that of all her eight ladies, Catherine the Great is the one she resembles most. So one swoops on the chapter that describes Catherine as a shrewd, calculating perfectionist, always short of money, who couldn’t go a day without love, who was adored by her servants (her valet set fire to his house to distract the court from the fact that Catherine was giving birth to a lover’s child) and that when she died – ‘beneath the grandeur and triumphs of the Empress lay the insecurity of a provincial German Princess’.
Did Marie Christine get up at five every morning like Catherine? I asked cautiously.
‘No,’ the green eyes glinted. ‘But nor, like Catherine, was I still a virgin seven years after I was married.’
How was she most like Catherine then?
She held up one of her cats to her face, their unblinking witchy stares unnervingly similar: ‘That you will have to work out for yourself.’
Changing the subject firmly, she said she originally called the book: Queens from a Far Country. ‘But the American publishers took me aside and said everyone will think you’re writing a book about faggots.’ Her husband, Prince Michael, she said, had thought up the new title: Crowned in a Far Country. He had also corrected her spelling and punctuation and taken out the more outrageous bits, which she had promptly put back in again.
She is lucky in having the nicest, most attractive of husbands. Immensely kind, utterly honourable, zanily funny and slightly eccentric, he turned up at a Gloucestershire party this winter in a floor-length Barbour and a child’s white sunhat.
‘Marriage,’ said Princess Michael, rising briskly to deadhead a yellow rose, ‘is finding someone you can share a flat with.’
But a husband who absolutely adores her must be a constant source of strength. His quietness douses her fire and tempers her recklessness. But if she sometimes snaps at him, using him as her cat’s scratching board, she delightedly recounts when he gets the better of her.
‘Some booksellers were coming for drinks,’ she explained, ‘and a lady’s heel had gone through my precious eighteenth-century carpet. Sewing it up, I pricked my finger and must have caught bubonic plague from some long gone Arab. In the middle of the night, I woke with a red-hot golf ball under my arm – blood poisoning!’
Having kept her husband up for most of the rest of the night with her complaining, the Princess roused him at six. Was it too early to ring the doctor?
‘Much too early,’ he murmured sleepily, ‘I think you are about to go back to sleep for a hundred years – thank God.’
How does she cope with two young children, two houses (doing most of the cooking herself), several jobs, endless engagements and trips abroad?
‘Like Catherine, I am highly organised, and a chronic list-maker.’
She denies she is ferociously competitive: ‘The only thing I seek is my own approval.’
But seeing her playing tennis in the country in a strange calf-length dress, her long hair streaming like a Valkyrie’s from a sweat-band, matching the handsome Marquis of Reading (a local champion) stroke for stroke, it is hard to believe she doesn’t want to win every point.
She can occasionally be manipulative. ‘She’ll ring you up, knowing you’ve got a helicopter, to ask if you know anyone who’s got a helicopter,’ grumbled one peer. But she is also gloriously, imaginatively generous. A bowl of just-picked mulberries will suddenly arrive on a warm summer afternoon. Two Christmases ago, she found out what my two dogs were called, and sent me scarlet towelling drying bags, beautifully embroidered with their names.
‘My desire’, she said, ‘is to improve the quality of my life and those that touch mine.’ This would sound pompous and bogus from anyone else, but she is in fact an inspired hostess.
Aristocrats, artists, writers, politicians are asked to her houses only because of their entertainment value. The sofas and chairs are arranged so that little groups can carry on intimate conversations in every language under the sun.
Any one evening, you may sit next to Tom Stoppard, Arianna Stassinopoulos, David Frost, an Italian prince or one of the more glamorous American senators. Ritzy English friends include the impossibly handsome Duke of Beaufort, with his anorexic figure and arctic blue eyes, and the dashing, thrice-married Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, who had such a spectacular fiftieth birthday party recently, that for miles around the helicopters could be seen landing like swarms of fireflies.
Another close friend is the delectable Rosie, Lady Northampton, who, having sat down in a restaurant the other day, was enchanted to receive a bottle of Krug from a table of complete strangers who’d decided she had the most beautiful bottom in the room.
Mrs Thatcher is also a frequent guest.
‘I’m mad about her,’ said the Princess. ‘She doesn’t waffle or witter. She is a strong, powerful woman of great character, who knows what she wants and sets out to do it. When you have her to dinner you have the woman not the Prime Minister. Last time we met, Mrs Thatcher asked me when my book was coming out. I said I’d send her a copy. “No, No”, she insisted. “I shall go into Hatchards an
d demand it in a loud voice. That will have more effect!”
An American senator and his wife were due for dinner at any minute. Marie Christine wandered round picking roses for the table, her cat familiars trailing her with strange unearthly cries.
Wasn’t she delighted she’d written such an entertaining book?
‘My problem’, she sighed, ‘is that I’m never satisfied. I always notice another layer of perfection to be achieved.’ She pointed to the Iceberg roses luminous in the dusk, spilling voluptuously over their neat lavender hedge. ‘I don’t think: how beautiful. I merely wonder what I’ve been feeding them that makes them grow too tall.’
The charming Watteau effect of the beautiful Princess gathering pale roses in a basket was spoilt by a relentless water-pump sound. Not content with desecrating Prince Charles’s bay-tree tubs, Holly the cat was throwing up yellow froth flecked with grass on the flagstones.
The Princess took me on a quick whisk through the house, which, like the garden, is impeccably decorated in pale greys, whites, pastel pinks and yellows, except for the drawing room which is a marvellous contrast of corals and terracottas, with walls lined with books and tapestries.
‘There is not a light switch in this place that is not designed by me,’ said the Princess.
From a top-floor room, I caught a glimpse of the Wales’s garden, its blaze of flowers positively gaudy compared with the pastel perfection of Princess Michael’s patch. Did her children, Lord Frederick (seven) and Lady Gabriella (five), get on with Prince William and Prince Harry?
‘Oh yes, our two front doors are always open, children keep running in for a biscuit or a cat. Ella and William are great friends.’
Enchanting Ella, with one eye half green, half gold, like her grandmother Princess Marina, was waiting for her mother to read her a bedtime story.
‘I like naughty stories best,’ she announced.
One so hopes the public agree and buy thousands of copies of her mother’s book, so that the ‘insecure provincial Princess’ gets the recognition and financial reward she so longs for. For above all Marie Christine is a life-enhancer.
