Craig Brown - One on One

Over dinner in Vienna, Jackie Kennedy charms Mr Khrushchev. As the evening unwinds, the Soviet Chairman draws his chair closer and closer to her. He compliments her on her white evening gown, and their subsequent conversation encompasses everything from dogs in space to folk dances in Ukraine. At the end of it, Khrushchev promises to send her a puppy as a present.

But the next morning, Khrushchev is back to his grumpy old self. He has no interest in charming the President, still less in being charmed by him. Kennedy emerges from their meeting feeling humiliated. On the flight from Vienna to London, both Kennedys appear downhearted, their gloom increased by the President’s perennial back problems. Their doctor administers drugs to buck them both up: amphetamines and vitamins for the First Lady and novocaine for the President, who is also taking the powerful painkiller Demerol.

In London the next day, the President informs the avuncular British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, of the battering he has received. ‘The President was completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman,’ records Macmillan. ‘It reminded me in a way of Lord Halifax or Neville Chamberlain trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler. For the first time in his life Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.’

In the morning, they attend the christening of Jackie’s niece Christina Radziwill. From there, they go to an informal lunch with the Prime Minister and a number of friends and relations, including the Ormsby-Gores and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The Duchess, an old friend of the President, *has mixed feelings about Jackie. ‘She is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way,’ she observes to her old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor.

That evening, the Kennedys attend a dinner at Buckingham Palace. It proves a minefield. The guest list has been the subject of negotiation: traditionally, divorcees are not invited, so the Queen has been reluctant to welcome Jackie’s sister Princess Lee Radziwill, who is on her second marriage, or her husband Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, who is on his third. Under pressure, she relents, but, by way of retaliation, singularly fails to invite Princess Margaret or Princess Marina, both of whose names Jackie has put forward. Jackie’s old paranoia returns: she sees it as a plot to do her down. ‘The Queen had her revenge,’ she confides to Gore Vidal. *‘No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture they could find.’ Jackie also tells Vidal that she found the Queen ‘pretty heavy-going’. (When Vidal repeats this to Princess Margaret some years later, the Princess loyally explains, ‘But that’s what she’s there for.’)

Over dinner, Jackie continues to feel awkward, even persecuted. ‘I think the Queen resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.’

The Queen asks Jackie about her visit to Canada. Jackie tells her how exhausting she found being on public view for hours on end. ‘The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”’ †According to Vidal (who is prone to impose his own thoughts on others), Jackie considers this the only time the Queen seems remotely human.

After dinner, the Queen asks if she likes paintings. Yes, says Jackie, she certainly does. The Queen takes her for a stroll down a long gallery in the palace. They stop in front of a Van Dyck. The Queen says, ‘That’s a good horse.’ Yes, agrees Jackie, that is a good horse. From Jackie’s account, this is the extent of their contact with one another, but others differ. Dinner at Buckingham Palace, writes Harold Macmillan in his diary that night, is ‘very pleasant’.

Nine months later, Jackie pays another visit to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, this time by herself. She is more in the swing of things now. ‘I don’t think I should say anything about it except how grateful I am and how charming she was,’ she tells the television cameras as she makes her escape.

ATTENDS

4, route du Champ d’Entraînement, Bois de Boulogne, Paris

May 18th 1972

The Queen is to pay a state visit to Paris to ‘improve the atmosphere’ before Britain’s entry into the Common Market. But before the visit takes place, word arrives at Buckingham Palace that her uncle David, once King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, has throat cancer, and is days from death.

The Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, contacts the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Christopher Soames, who in turn arranges a meeting with Jean Thin, the Duke of Windsor’s doctor. The Ambassador comes straight to the point. Dr Thin recalls: ‘He told me bluntly that it was all right for the Duke to die before or after the visit, but that it would be politically disastrous if he were to expire in the course of it. Was there anything I could do to reassure him about the timing of the Duke’s end?’

Unversed in royal protocol, Thin is taken aback. He can offer no such reassurance. The Duke may die before, during or after his niece’s state visit to France, but he is not in the business of making predictions. The Palace is put out. Will the Duke prove as much of a nuisance in death as in life? As it turns out, the prospect of the Queen’s visit gives the Duke a new lease of life: more than ever, he seems determined to cling on.

And so he does. He is still alive when the royal party lands at Orly Airport on May 15th. Each evening, Sir Christopher telephones Dr Thin to see how his patient is coming along. Dr Thin reports that His Royal Highness is unable to swallow and on a glucose drip, but still intent on welcoming his monarch.

At 4.45 p.m. on May 18th, the royal entourage arrives after a day at the Longchamp races. The Duchess of Windsor greets the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales with a succession of shaky curtseys, ushering them into the orchid-laden drawing room for tea. For the next fifteen minutes, no one mentions the Duke of Windsor’s health. ‘It was as if they were pretending that David was perfectly well,’ the Duchess says later. She complains that the Queen was ‘not at all warm’, though she may simply be irritated by the Windsors’ jumpy pugs.

The only member of the royal visitors to have been here before is the Prince of Wales, who called by last October, hoping to patch things up between his black-sheep uncle and the rest of the family. The very next month, Uncle David was diagnosed with cancer, so the Prince’s account in his diary of his visit provides a glimpse, albeit a sniffy glimpse, into the Windsors’ life as it was lived, not long ago: ‘Upon entering the house I found footmen and pages wearing identical scarlet and black uniforms to the ones ours wear at home. It was rather pathetic seeing that. The eye then wandered to a table in the hall on which lay a red box with “The King” on it … The whole house reeks of some particularly strong joss sticks and from out of the walls came the muffled sound of scratchy piped music. The Duchess appeared from a host of the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen. The look of incredulity on their faces was a study and most of them were thoroughly tight. One man shook hands with me twice, muttered something incomprehensible in French with a strong American accent and promptly collapsed into the arms of a strategically placed black footman.’

The Duchess (dismissed by Charles after their meeting as ‘a hard woman – totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial’) leads the Queen up the stairs, where the Duke is sitting in a wheelchair, crisply dressed for the occasion in a blue poloneck and blazer. These garments conceal a drip tube, which emerges from the back of the collar and then swoops down to flasks concealed behind a curtain. He has shrivelled to ninety pounds. As the Queen enters, he struggles to his feet and, with some effort, manages to lower his neck in a bow. Dr Thin worries that this may cause the drip to pop out, but all is well, and it stays put.