Post by Admin on Aug 30, 2021 15:28:31 GMT -4
British and American icons collide in The Crown’s second season when John and Jackie Kennedy visit Buckingham Palace in June 1961, just months after Kennedy began his presidential term. In the episode—which Claire Foy has described as her favorite of the season—Queen Elizabeth shares a quiet moment with Jackie while giving her a personal tour of the palace, during which the women discuss their strange positions as introverted public figures.
It is a rare moment of personal bonding for Queen Elizabeth, who is shocked to hear, weeks later, that the First Lady spliced into her deepest insecurities by telling dinner guests that Elizabeth is “a middle-aged woman so incurious, unintelligent and unremarkable that Britain’s new reduced place in the world was not a surprise but an inevitability.” As if that was not insult enough for Elizabeth, who was already feeling a bit frumpy and irrelevant in the episode, Jackie also calls Buckingham Palace “second-rate, dilapidated and sad, like a neglected provincial hotel.” (Wit intact, Elizabeth responds to the news by saying, “Well, we must have her again soon.”)
But did such high-class, high-school-level drama really cloud this 1961 meeting of British and American royalty?
According to Cecil Beaton and Gore Vidal, Kennedy did have some criticisms of Queen Elizabeth following the actual 1961 meeting. Per The Telegraph, Beaton claimed that Kennedy “was unimpressed by the palace furnishings and by the Queen’s dress and hairstyle.” Jackie, who proved herself a chic style sensation during the 1961 European tour, was dressed for dinner in a sleek blue silk Chez Ninon gown, while Elizabeth looked more old-fashioned in A-line tulle. (The Crown suggests that Jackie was not the only person skeptical of the queen’s new cropped, curled hairstyle. Prince Philip jokes: “It’s certainly very practical. Should you ever feel compelled to ride a motorcycle, it could always double as a helmet.”)
Meanwhile, according to The Telegraph, Vidal claimed that Jackie described Elizabeth after their meeting as “pretty heavy going.” When Vidal passed along this note to Princess Margaret years later, Elizabeth’s sister is said to have retorted, “But that’s what she’s there for.” Coincidentally, the two had actually crossed professional paths a decade earlier when Jackie, working as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” for the Washington-Times Herald, covered Elizabeth’s coronation.
Reader’s Digest remembers a different kind of drama that actually preceded the dinner—and is not referenced on The Crown—involving the guest list.
Traditionally, divorcées 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.”
During the meeting, John Kennedy presented Elizabeth with a signed portrait of himself in a silver Tiffany’s frame, with a message he had handwritten: “To Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, with appreciation and the highest esteem, John F. Kennedy.” But the hostess gift did not seem to thaw the monarch’s steely veneer during the meal. Jackie supposedly told Vidal, per Reader’s Digest, “I think the queen resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.”
One account does suggest some post-dinner warmness between Jackie and Elizabeth, which mirrors the moment of bonding depicted on The Crown. Reader’s Digest alleges that Elizabeth asked Jackie about her trip to Canada. Jackie, acclimating to life as a public figure, told Elizabeth how tiring it was to be on display. Elizabeth reportedly responded, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”
After dinner, Elizabeth is said to have taken Jackie on a small tour of the palace to see “some pictures,” including a painting of a horse by Anthony van Dyck. The queen reportedly observed, “That’s a good horse,” a point to which Jackie agreed. Though the account has not been confirmed, Jackie’s sister Lee Radziwill wrote in her 2015 memoir, Lee, about an exchange with Prince Philip that evening—which also took place in the palace art gallery. “We took a tour through the [palace] art gallery and Prince Philip said to me, ‘You’re just like me—you have to walk three steps behind.’”
John Kennedy followed up on the dinner in a birthday message to the queen. “May I also at the same time say how grateful my wife and I are for the cordial hospitality offered to us by your Majesty and Prince Philip during our visit to London last Monday,” he wrote. “We shall always cherish the memory of that delightful evening.”
Though there have been no reports of Jackie’s comments getting back to Elizabeth, it is interesting to note that Jackie visited the monarch in lower-profile circumstances the following year, without her husband. Jackie was staying in town with Radziwill, who lived several blocks away from Buckingham Palace, and the queen invited Jackie to lunch on March 28, 1962. Afterward, Jackie was notably discreet while speaking to press about the lunch: “I don’t think I should say anything about it except how grateful I am and how charming she was.”
On The Crown, Jackie apologizes to Elizabeth for speaking about her publicly, and explains that she had been prescribed medication to deal with the stresses of her new high-profile lifestyle that left her loose-lipped. In 2013, New York magazine reported that Max Jacobson, the original “Dr. Feelgood,” treated the royal couple in those early days of the presidency.
Jacobson stayed on call for Kennedy [once he was elected president]. The White House would contact his office using the code name “Mrs. Dunn,” and Jacobson would travel to D.C. or Hyannisport or Palm Beach, usually on a twin-engine Cessna owned and piloted by Mark Shaw, a patient who was also a photographer who frequently shot the Kennedy family. Gate logs show Jacobson visited the White House more than 30 times in 1961 and 1962, to see both the president and the First Lady.
Though The Crown creator Peter Morgan has not specified what intel he bases his Elizabeth plot twists on, he has said, “I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on the information we have about her.”
Two years after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, Queen Elizabeth opened a U.K. memorial for the late U.S. president at Runnymede in Berkshire—the site of the sealing of the Magna Carta. During the dedication, which was attended by Jackie, and her children Caroline and John, Elizabeth gave a speech saying, “The unprecedented intensity of that wave of grief, mixed with something akin to despair, which swept over our people at the news of President Kennedy’s assassination, was a measure of the extent to which we recognized what he had already accomplished, and of the high hopes that rode with him in a future that was not to be.”
A photograph shows Kennedy’s son, John, holding hands with Prince Philip. The Kennedy Memorial Trust, established by the British government, awards scholarships for British postgraduates attending either Harvard or M.I.T.
