Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece
By Hugo Vickers
St. Martin’s, 477 pages, $29.95
Improper Pursuits
By Carola Hicks
St. Martin’s, 404 pages, $29.95
Most people probably don’t know it, but Queen Elizabeth’s mother-in-law was a bit nutty. Not that she ever misbehaved exactly, though she wasn’t too fond of the sanitarium she was forced into by her very proper mother and husband, and even plotted, unsuccessfully, to escape. Perhaps ordering a taxi in which to flee wasn’t the savviest of schemes.
Then again, she imagined herself to be the mistress of both Jesus Christ and Buddha, so she must’ve felt she had a right to do as she pleased. Her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ernst Simmel, thought she was suffering from a ” ‘neurotic-prepsychotic libidinous condition.’ ” Even Sigmund Freud got involved, advising ” ‘an exposure of [her] gonads to X-rays, in order to accelerate the menopause,’ ” to calm her down.
This was before she began her career as a kind of freelance nun, gussied up in a heavy, gray, velvet, full-length, custom-made habit adorned with a Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer, traveling through Europe. Her mother, Princess Victoria, said of Alice, ” ‘What can you say of a nun who smokes and plays canasta?’ ” Prince Philip’s recorded response to his mother’s habit of wearing a habit: ” ‘[S]he did not have to worry about . . . getting her hair done.’ ” Even Queen Mary, who was her aunt, called Alice ” ‘too whacked for words.’ ” So much for royal decorum.
But if it wasn’t for such behavior, there would be little interest in reading “Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece,” Hugo Vickers’ biography of this endearing, yet otherwise minor, royal figure, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria’s, born deaf and in 1903 married to Prince Andrew of Greece. But neither Alice, nor Vickers, author of biographies of Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh and the duke and duchess of Windsor, among others, disappoints. As soon as you think she’s settled in somewhere–a castle here, a palace there–along comes another revolution or war, both of which were always punctuated by exile from wherever she was, whether Darmstadt or Athens.
She lived in an exalted world where people were named Ducky and Dame Flora and Grand Duke Cyril and as senior citizens ended up in places with names such as the Distressed Gentlefolks Aid Association home. She had an aunt who became a czarina and a sister who became queen of Sweden (Alice, born at Windsor Castle but raised in what is now Germany, had never been to Greece before she married into its royal family). She traveled in high style yet complained of being penniless (and, apparently, often was, living off the largesse of wealthy family members).
Unlike some other royals, for whom life is just one long, glorious, citizen-supported, champagne-and-caviar boondoggle, Alice’s had its ups and downs, and not just because of her fractured and fragile mental state. Her marriage to Prince Andrew of Greece, the fourth son of King George I, was unhappy, though it did provide her with five children, the youngest being Philip, whom she more or less ignored most of his childhood. (For two five-year periods before he married Elizabeth, Alice chose not to have contact with him, “tantamount,” writes Vickers, “to a renunciation of her role as mother.”)
Still, Alice had her good points, such as hiding a Jewish family in her Athens apartment during World War II. Vickers’ detailed regurgitation of her every movement, her every move away from reality and her royal relatives’ opinions of her makes Alice an amusingly compelling–if rather sad–character, and one you wouldn’t necessarily have wanted for your mother.
Another aristocrat who went her own way was Lady Diana Spencer, born in 1735, more than two centuries before the latter Lady Diana Spencer who married the grandson of Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece, and went her own way. This Diana Spencer, as portrayed in Carola Hicks’ lush “Improper Pursuits,” defied virtually every limit imposed upon her by her breeding, class and sex–and got away with it.
She was the eldest child of the third duke of Marlborough, and no historian would have given her a second glance had she merely married and lived a quiet life of luxury, running various estates, supervising servants who supervised her children, keeping abreast of the latest trends from Paris, all of which she did. Her marriage to Viscount “Bully” Bolingbroke was, initially, conventional to the point of being bland. But unhappiness eventually seeped in–Hicks calls it an “unstoppable fissure”–and as so often happens, it acted as a diving board from which she leapt into another life completely, full of daring choices, unusual circumstances, and intellectual and artistic freedom that she might otherwise never have known. Her life, writes Hicks, is representative of “the many splendid and vigorous, determined or outrageous women of the time, whose lives are gradually being recovered.”
Lucky for Lady Di, as well as us, that it was Hicks, an art historian at Cambridge University, who did the recovering, for though this is her first biography, she nonetheless does a top-drawer job of bringing her subject and 18th Century London and its environs to life in all its eccentricity
Where, even, to begin?
That gossip papers wrote of the philandering Bolingbroke’s deliberately giving Diana venereal disease out of spite (In a bizarre game of what goes around comes around, so the story went, he gave it to her, she gave it to a lover, who gave it to “a ‘woman of pleasure,’ who in turn, ‘La Ronde style,’ gave it back to Bully.”)? That Lady Diana had a lover, the dashing and delightfully named Topham Beauclerk, four years her junior, who was an intimate friend of Dr. Johnson’s and Edmund Burke’s? That she had Beauclerk’s child out of wedlock? That she then left Bolingbroke and their four children, went through a highly public, scandalous divorce, and married Beauclerk? That she then had three more children by him and defied etiquette by continuing to live and play in polite society? That she became a lady-in-waiting to the queen of England but eventually was fired? That she took up art and design and, against all odds, became a respected artist both collected and appreciated, championed by her close friend, writer Horace Walpole? That she even became an important designer for Josiah Wedgwood and his innovative tableware? Or, lastly, that George, a son from her first marriage, and Mary, a daughter from her second, had their own sexual liaison, which resulted in four more children? Of that relationship, says Hicks rather dryly, “Mary had taken a close family relationship a degree too far.” That George’s father, Bolingbroke, had had a horse named Incest only adds to the weirdness.
Lady Diana’s life was one of unusual idiosyncrasy, about which it might have been said that she followed her bliss to the extreme. She used her notoriety to further her art, and used her art to maintain her position in the upper echelons of English society. “Trying to assert her own will and live how she wanted,” Hicks writes, “resulted in the continuing attention of society.”
It was, in its own way, a very modern life. Had there been reality-TV shows back then, surely this Lady Diana Spencer would have allowed the cameras to move right in.
Wading through the elite gene pools
Indispensable to any biography of a royal is the family tree, to which any reader will have to refer often to figure out who’s who; who’s married to, or is the daughter or son of, whom; and who’s an earl or a duke or a hereditary grand duke.
Even then, however, it can be confusing. It doesn’t help that in any big royal family, from the Hohenlohe-Langenburgs to the Battenbergs, people’s names and titles change as others die or marry out of the family. Royal family trees are only snapshots of a moment in time. One minute a princess, the next a queen. One minute you’re called Alice, the next you’re referred to as Andrew.
In “Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece,” for instance, author Hugo Vickers provides four family trees, one each for the British, Greek, Hesse-Darmstadt and Battenberg royal family lines. Alice is in all four, so searching to see how she’s related to, say, Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, or Louis, Admiral of the Fleet, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, can be a trial. And it doesn’t help that the royals seem to name their offspring from a list with only about a dozen choices. Queen Victoria had a daughter named Alice, who had a daughter named Victoria, who had a daughter named Alice.
Carola Hicks offers two family trees in “Improper Pursuit.” Between them they include several Williams, Roberts and Charlottes; four Georges and Elizabeths; five Dianas and Charleses; six Marys; and eight Johns.
— Dan Santow
