Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Baron’s gifted artist friends included Stephen Ward, who drew a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh, among others, and, more famously, in his capacity as an osteopath and social intermediary, introduced the call girl Christine Keeler to the Conservative government minister John Profumo. In June 1963 Profumo, who had lied to Parliament about his association with Keeler, resigned – and the press, remarkably, found a way to link Prince Philip to ‘the Profumo affair’. Ward, Philip’s Thursday Club acquaintance and Christine Keeler’s landlord, was charged with living ‘wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution’. He took an overdose on the final night of his trial and never recovered. He was found guilty on two charges, but died without sentence being passed. Ward’s drawings of Prince Philip and other members of the Royal Family were put up for sale to help defray his legal costs: Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures since 1945 (and a Soviet spy since 1936 – you couldn’t make it up!) bought them, privately, to save the Royal Family public embarrassment.

  There was embarrassment nevertheless. Ward had hosted parties at which a feature was that ‘the man who serves dinner’ – in the words of Lord Denning’s official report into the affair – ‘is nearly naked except for a small square lace apron round his waist such as a waitress might wear. He wears a black mask over his head with slits for eye-holes. He cannot therefore be recognised by any of the guests. Some reports stop there and say that nothing evil takes place. It is done as a comic turn and no more. This may well be so at some of the parties. But at others I am satisfied that it is followed by perverted sex orgies: that the man in the mask is a “slave” who is whipped.’

  Was the Duke of Edinburgh ‘the man in the mask’? On 24 June 1963 the Daily Mirror filled its front page with a huge headline, ‘PRINCE PHILIP AND THE PROFUMO SCANDAL’, and managed to get the best of both worlds, opening the story with the words, ‘The foulest rumour which is being circulated about the Profumo Scandal has involved the Royal Family,’ adding, immediately, a much smaller headline: ‘Rumour is utterly unfounded.’

  From 1963 until his death in 2006, aged ninety-one, John Profumo kept his own counsel and devoted himself to good works. He became a CBE in 1975 and, in 1995, at a dinner held at Claridge’s Hotel to mark Margaret Thatcher’s seventieth birthday, the disgraced former minister found himself seated at the Queen’s right hand. At the reception after the dinner, he saw Prince Philip and thanked him for the honour of being allowed to sit next to Her Majesty. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ said Prince Philip dismissively. His Royal Highness was not impressed by Profumo. Jack Profumo was one of the most effortlessly charming men I ever met: Prince Philip was instinctively wary of that kind of charm. And, more to the point, the Duke of Edinburgh was not amused to have been associated, however briefly, tangentially, and irrelevantly, with ‘the Profumo affair’.

  Another colourful member of ‘Baron’s Court’ was the painter Vasco Lazzolo. He also sketched a portrait of Prince Philip. ‘Lazzolo,’ Robin Dalton remembers, ‘discovered a magic pill which was supposed to make us all madly sexy. You put it underneath your pillow and at the crucial moment of intercourse you were supposed to pop it and inhale. David [Milford Haven] and I tried it once, but as we were madly sexy anyway it didn’t appear to do more than slow up proceedings. We were always losing the pills under the pillow. I think they were yellow and I expect they were the first primitive precursors of amyl nitrite.’ Talk to Tony Snowdon, Baron’s sometime assistant, and later Prince Philip’s brother-in-law, and he gossiped happily about the ‘madly sexy’ goings-on in the London of the 1950s and 1960s. Talking to Prince Philip on the same subject the most I got out of him was: ‘All that passed me by.’

  In 2008, when the author James Hogg published a biography of another of the Baron set, the actor James Robertson Justice, he asked Prince Philip if he would consider contributing a foreword. James Hogg told me, ‘The book originally featured a story given to me by Molly Parkin [James Robertson Justice’s mistress], which involved her, JRJ, and a fluorescent light tube. It was extremely graphic! Anyway, I received a very polite letter from Prince Philip’s private secretary, saying he’d be delighted to write a foreword, but would I please consider removing said story, as he couldn’t really put his name to something so pornographic.’

  Philip remembered James Robertson Justice with affection as an ‘adventurer, man of many actions, naturalist, intellectual and incidental film actor’. He said, ‘He lived every bit of his life more than to the full and gave his friends endless pleasure and entertainment.’

  I asked Prince Philip, ‘Have you lived your life more than to the full?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, firmly. ‘Certainly not.’ He added, ‘James Justice was an eccentric and I’m not.’ The Duke of Edinburgh recalled that the actor best remembered by the rest of us as Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor films was a wonderful anecdotalist who did indeed tell ‘some racy stories’, but the Duke remembered him best from the times during the summer in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s when, staying at Balmoral, he would take his children to visit Justice and his wife Irina at their house at Spinningdale. ‘His passion for hawking – and spearing flounders in the nearby Fleet estuary – was infectious; activities that were thoroughly enjoyed by my two older children.’

  Through Baron, Prince Philip was introduced to some intriguing characters. Having met at Broadlands in 1947, the photographer and the Duke became friends. Philip asked Baron to take his wedding photographs, and Baron invited Philip to join his informal luncheon club. The Thursday Club, as it was known, met originally in an upstairs room at Wheeler’s Restaurant in Old Compton Street, Soho. The purpose of the club was purely convivial: an excuse to start the weekend early, eat Wheeler’s finest fish (Bernard Walsh, the restaurant’s proprietor, was a founder member), and drink Wheeler’s cheap-and-cheerful house white wine – and plenty of it. According to Robin Dalton, ‘Thursday night was a lost cause if you happened to be the wife or girlfriend of any of the members.’ Her boyfriend, David Milford Haven, joined the club, as did Philip and Mike Parker. The members (all male) included Baron’s brother, Jack, artists like Vasco Lazzolo, newspaper editors (Arthur Christiansen of the Daily Express, Frank Owen of the Daily Mail), actors (James Robertson Justice, David Niven), scriptwriters (Don Stewart, Monja Danischewsky), amusing men about town: Compton Mackenzie, Peter Ustinov, Lord Glenavy (better known as the stammering raconteur and columnist Patrick Campbell), Larry Adler. The gatherings were high-spirited, occasionally raucous, but never debauched. There was gossip and banter, but no birds – other than the cuckoo …

  The cuckoo became notorious. It lived inside a cuckoo clock in the room where the lunch was held. Predictably, it emerged on the hour and the half-hour, but its appearances on the half-hour were inevitably brief. One day, by way of an amusing wager, the club members bet Baron that he and his camera would not be quick enough to take a snapshot of the cuckoo when it popped out at half past one. Baron rose to the challenge – and failed. Next week, he tried again – setting his camera on a tripod this time. He failed again: Mike Parker, apparently, nudged him as the cuckoo appeared. At the third attempt, Baron insisted that none of the club members be allowed within reaching distance of him or his camera. He was foiled once more: Parker had come equipped with three thunder-flashes – small, safe, lightly explosive smoke bombs, used in military training, and useful for japes like this. Just as the hands of the cuckoo clock reached half past one, Parker, Philip and either James Robertson Justice or Arthur Christiansen deployed the thunder-flashes: one burst immediately under Baron’s camera, one landed on a table, and the third ended up in the fireplace, where its explosion prompted a downfall of soot from the chimney. There was laughter – and blackened faces: the Duke was right by the fireplace – but when the smoke cleared, and the police arrived, general agreement that perhaps it was time to call off the wager.

  ‘We had fun at those lunches,’ Parker recalled, ‘plenty of laughter, but nothing louche or lewd, I assure you
.’ He also claimed that, even then, at the beginning of his public life, Philip had ‘an instinct for self-preservation’. ‘He was always correct,’ Parker told me, ‘always kept just that little bit of distance, never went too far. Most of the chaps were absolutely above board, but we had a nose for those that weren’t.’ They were always wary of Larry Adler,92 and Parker said that, from the outset, he thought there was ‘something unsavoury’ about Stephen Ward. When Kim Philby turned up as a guest one Thursday (some time before his exposure as a Soviet spy), Parker’s nose twitched, but only because Philby was ‘the dullest man in the place’.

  Courtiers of the old school (the likes of Tommy Lascelles) always had their doubts about Mike Parker. He was Australian, after all, brash and breezy, and inclined to sail too close to the wind. They had their reservations about Baron, too. ‘Baron was a gambler,’ said Peter Ustinov, shortly after his death, ‘and it sometimes seemed to me as I watched him at work and at play that for him the whole of existence was a pastime with a score.’ Baron took risks, and he knew all types and conditions of men – and women.

  It was Baron who introduced the Duke of Edinburgh to the first of the ‘leading ladies’ with whom he is supposed to have had an affair. Pat Kirkwood was an actress, singer, and celebrated pantomime principal boy. The critic Kenneth Tynan (who knew about these things) once described her legs as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. In 1948 she was twenty-seven and starring in a musical revue called Starlight Roof at the London Hippodrome. According to Miss Kirkwood, one night, after the show, Baron (who, by his own admission, was besotted with her) turned up with Philip and an equerry, and the four of them went off to dine. They had a late supper at Les Ambassadeurs in Mayfair and then went dancing at the nearby Milroy nightclub. Philip asked Pat to dance. And she did. ‘But nothing happened,’ she assured me. ‘Nothing happened at all. Then, or later. It was innocent fun. He was out on a night with the boys and I just happened to be there.’ At the nightclub, she recalled, ‘people stopped and stared, and there was some tut-tutting and disapproving looks, and Philip responded by pulling a face – but that is as shocking and outrageous as his behaviour got.’ When the dancing stopped, they went back to Baron’s place for scrambled eggs. And then it was time for bed. Philip went off with his equerry, and Baron drove Pat home to her mother in St John’s Wood.

  Pat Kirkwood did meet Prince Philip half a dozen times more – at show-business charity events, in the official line-up after a televised command performance, in another line-up, after a charity concert at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. On each occasion friendly handshakes and brief pleasantries were exchanged. And that’s it. There is nothing more to tell. Yet on the fragile foundation of one night of dancing and a handful of handshakes rests a massive mountain of myth that has managed to sustain itself across sixty years and is usually summed up in the headline, ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. In 2012 the episode even became the basis of a one-woman musical, Pat Kirkwood is Angry, in which the star was portrayed by the operatic mezzo-soprano Jessica Walker.

  According to Miss Walker, ‘The inescapable fact is that Kirkwood’s first encounter with the Duke of Edinburgh, and six other meetings with him that followed, ruined her life and robbed her of official recognition in the Honours list, so they are crucial to any proper understanding of her character.’ Pat Kirkwood was twice recommended for an OBE, but never received the honour. She certainly felt that the whispers about her and the Prince damaged her career as well as her reputation. She felt hounded by the press. She wrote to Buckingham Palace in sorrow and in anger: ‘… if there had been some support from your direction, the matter could have been squashed years ago, instead of (my) having to battle a sea of sharks single-handed’. Prince Philip’s response was sympathetic, but to the point: ‘Short of starting libel proceedings, there is absolutely nothing to be done. Invasion of privacy, invention and false quotations are the bane of our existence.’

  ‘Actually, it’s quite hateful,’ Katie Boyle said to me. She was another celebrated beauty from the 1950s who was regularly mentioned in dispatches as one of Philip’s flings. According to the book the Duke of Edinburgh brought to my attention, ‘Philip’s affair with Katie was very steamy. They had the most extraordinary times together.’ On one occasion, claims author Nicholas Davies, when Katie Boyle – a blonde, glamorous, television personality, seven years the Duke’s junior – ‘entertained Philip at her London home, she received an urgent message that her husband had returned unexpectedly and was on his way home. Philip rapidly exited through the back entrance just as Katie’s husband put his key in the front door.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve met Prince Philip several times,’ Katie Boyle told me, when I raised the story with her. ‘I think he’s the most fantastic man. I love his dryness. But an affair? It’s ludicrous, pure fabrication. When it appears in print, people believe it. You can’t take legal action because it fans the flames, so you just have to accept people telling complete lies about you.’

  I knew Katie Boyle from childhood. I knew her quite well. I believed her completely. I believe Hélène Cordet, too.

  In the 1950s in Britain, Hélène Cordet was celebrated, in a moderate way, as a cabaret artiste, television performer, and the hostess of a chic Mayfair nightclub, the Saddle Room in Hamilton Place. In the 1920s, in France, Hélène Foufounis, as she then was, and Prince Philip of Greece were childhood friends. The Foufounis family were Greeks in exile, royalist to the core, comfortably off, with a country house and farm near Marseilles and a seaside holiday home at Berck-Plage, near Le Touquet. Philip’s mother and Madame Foufounis were friends; Philip’s English nanny, Emily Roose, and the Foufounis’s English nanny were allies. On holiday, in the country and at the seaside, Philip and the younger two of his elder sisters, Cécile and Sophie, played with Hélène and her brother, Iaini, and her sister, Ria. Apparently, Ria, an invalid, bedridden with a diseased hip, was especially fond of Philip. (I can believe it: I have seen a photograph taken of them together at Berck-Plage: she looks adoring, he looks adorable: he must have been about four at the time.) Hélène was four years older than Philip and, more than sixty years later, recalled, ‘I was very jealous of him when he was a small boy. I don’t think he disliked me as much as I disliked him, but my feelings were more jealousy than anything. Everyone adored him so much, particularly my mother, because he was so good-looking. My father had died when I was very small and I felt as if I wasn’t loved by my stepfather, and was the least loved of all my family. So when this blond, blue-eyed, German-looking little boy came along, and my mother paid so much attention to him, I was livid. And he and my brother Iaini used to gang up on me.’

  Philip and Hélène were childhood friends. They met again a few years later, in London, when Philip was fourteen or fifteen. Hélène’s stepfather had died and the family fortune had taken a tumble, and she and her mother were living in a flat in Bayswater: ‘I thought, “Oh God!” He had been so beautiful as a child and now he was growing up. It gave me a bit of a shock.’

  Hélène was growing up, too. Aged just twenty, she married her first husband, an Oxford undergraduate, William Kirby. The civil ceremony took place in Oxford, followed by a blessing at the Greek Orthodox Church in Bayswater, with Philip, aged sixteen, in attendance. According to Hélène, ‘He was the best man and gave me away at my first wedding.’ He also, apparently, trod on her veil. The marriage to William Kirby failed and the young Hélène sought consolation in the arms of a French airman, Marcel Boisot. Hélène and Marcel had two children: a son, Max, born in December 1943, and a daughter, Louise, born in February 1945, shortly after their marriage at Paddington Register Office the previous month. It is these two children that many of the rumour-mongers would have you believe were fathered by Prince Philip. (The rumour-mongers have even gone to the trouble of dating Philip’s wartime shore leave to prove it might be possible.) Philip was godfather to both Max and Louise and, over the years, took an interest in them. He encouraged Hélène to send Max to Gordonstoun (
rather than Winchester) and Hélène’s grandson, named Philip, went to Gordonstoun, too.

  Philip and Hélène were friends, not lovers. He was not the father of her children. The rumours started because, when Max was born, Hélène was still married to William Kirby, though they had lived apart for two years. At the time, no one knew about Marcel Boisot. Hélène allowed the paternity of her children to remain a mystery. Even in her memoir, Born Bewildered, published in 1961, years later, she does not name him. I got the impression (though she denied it) that Hélène Cordet (sometime Foufounis, Kirby, and Boisot) rather relished the frisson created by the rumours surrounding her friendship with Prince Philip. I also got the impression that Prince Philip thought so, too, and it irritated him. Hélène said that, when the rumours were at their height, she sought his advice about how best to handle the situation: ‘It used to make me really mad, not so much for me, as for the Royal Family. It wasn’t right, that chit-chat. So I said to Philip, “What do I do?” He said, “Look, if you like you can sue them, but I don’t think it’s worth it. On the contrary, it will just stir up more trouble.”’

  Is that, in fact, what I am doing now, stirring up more trouble, reheating old stories under the pretext of dismissing them, creating a whole new sensation while claiming to be throwing a wet blanket over old ones? I hope not, but I am aware of the risk. I am taking that risk, nonetheless, partly because I am interested in the phenomenon of how a raft of rumours without foundation can become immovably embedded in the public imagination; and partly, too, because I recognise that a general policy of never commenting, explaining or denying stories (which has much to commend it) can sometimes encourage even good people to think, perhaps, there is some truth in a lie. And now the man is dead, is there any harm in the whole truth being told? And what is ‘the whole truth’? It is not easy to uncover.