Birthday Boy: Gentleman in Waiting

The lace-bedizened infant seen here in the impeccably regal (imperial, in fact) lap of his great-grandmother turns 64 today.  Charles Philip Arthur George (known formally as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Royal Knight Companion of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Member of the Order of Merit, Knight of the Order of Australia, Companion of the Queen's Service Order, Member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, and Aide-de-Camp to Her Majesty) must certainly rank among the most patient persons in history.

As I do his sister, the formidable Princess Royal (perhaps the current member of the British family most like the occasionally terrifying Queen Mary), I rather admire the man.  He has managed to maintain a quirky individuality even as he's nearly faultlessly done his duty this past half-century or so, and while his personal life certainly had a rough patch after his unwise first marriage, he has taken from its wreckage two apparently well-raised sons and found very evident happiness in a second marriage that likely ought to have happened decades before it was finally manageable.

Seeing him here, cradled in that not-exactly-maternal embrace, it is rather astonishing what continuity this image represents.  Today, the baby's daughter-in-law is the Duchess of Cambridge, and a fetching creature she is.  In 1867 - just two years after the American Civil War ended - Queen Mary was (as unlikely as this may seem) herself a helpless babe in arms.  Her godmother was the last Duchess of Cambridge, a redoubtable woman who presaged the later longevity of the family by living from 1797 until 1889.  So, the ruddy-faced man who today opines on the environment and wears perhaps the most beautifully cut suits of anyone this side of his father was dandled on the lap of a woman who was, in the year that Marx published Das Kapital, brought to the baptismal font by a woman born in the year Napoleon deposed the last Doge of Venice.

All of which, because I am funny that way, makes me sit and think.  What I mostly hope is that, when she is given the chance, the Duchess of Cornwall emulates the style of her husband's great-grandmother and loads on the jewels with a trowel.  I think she'd look well draped in ropes of pearls en style Teck, and heaven knows the toque is ripe for a comeback.  In the meanwhile, I hope the Prince has a very happy birthday, secure in the knowledge that, if he can stick it out, eventually he'll take over the family firm.

Of the Queen and the Queens

As this apparently endless trip continues to unfurl, I'm working hard to remember how very marvelous so much of it was.  When an experience ends in a great deal of staring at blotchy institutional ceilings while unpleasant things are done to one, that can be a challenge.

Still, I'm hopeful that the takeaways from Summer 2012 will be mostly positive.  The crossing really was a remarkable experience, and not just because Queen Mary 2 is so chockablock with reminders of one of my favorite people, its formidable namesake, seen above presiding over the Queens Room (which one is repeatedly reminded features The Largest Dance Floor at Sea).

We really did have a fabulous time just watching the dancing (and occasionally joining in, the lessons imparted to my sister and me back when we were all going to be pillars of small town society somehow mysteriously still effective).  We loved the people-watching that the Queens Room encourages, and happily looked out for our favorites, after a day or two, out on the floor.

Leading that list was an extremely elegant, British-to-their-bones couple, perfectly turned out at all times of day and night (she in tweeds with pearls by day, and discreet taffeta numbers in the evenings, clearly Grandmama's diamonds glittering in a brooch or earrings), who made every number a real joy. Also of note were a Japanese pair, very endearing, who danced every dance, with a very high level of technical perfection, both with the most intense and solemn expressions, as if the whole thing were an onerous duty pressed upon that they were for some mysterious reason bound to carry out.

And then there were all the others, chief among them the dear ladies squired by the Dance Hosts, the retired gentleman hired by the line to ensure that singles and wallflowers get their turn.  One enthusiastic foxtrotter d'un certain age looked almost exactly like the late Dame Joan Sutherland (only, if possible, taller), and she always seemed to score the tiniest and most adroit of the Hosts, steering him across the floor in a way that called to mind the ship itself being escorted by a tug out of a particularly tricky harbor.

Now, of course, we are turning our attention to the Olympics, in a desultory sort of way, although I really don't think anything will top the opening ceremony unless they shoot the Princess Royal out of a cannon.  I'm still giggling from the astounding vision of the corgis trotting along next to the Queen, striding down a Buck House corridor with the impossibly attractive Mr. Craig.  In her late old age, Osbert Sitwell famously observed, Queen Mary developed a unique sort of "film-star glamour," and the same can now be said of her granddaughter, whose Jubilee apotheosis appears to be complete.

And I do think she's one-upped even her remarkable mother, whose love of the spotlight, however all-encompassing, never even distantly approached the concept of parachuting.  It's something, though, that I believe, after a certain amount of raised eyebrows, May Teck might have thought a wonderful joke...

Sailing, Sailing...

And we're off - again!  Il mio sorella, as Georgie might say, arrived in fine form yesterday afternoon, and today we motor down to Southampton to embark on the next stage of our journey, on the Queen Mary.  Technically, of course, she's the Queen Mary 2, but that makes me think of WilliamandMary rather than the dear lady for whom the ship (like her predecessor, languishing now at Long Beach) was originally named.

There will likely, therefore, be something of a hiatus hereabouts, as one of the great joys of this trip will be that there will be minimal, if any, connection to the Great Wide World and its Web.  Since that includes the demon BlackBerry, I couldn't be happier, no matter how distraught the dear folks back at the office get...

Birthday Girl: Miss Peggy Lee (and Friend)

North Dakota's finest export, Miss Norma Egstrom, might have been 92 today.  Peggy Lee didn't live quite that long, but while she was around, she ruled.  We see her here in 1969, delivering a definitive take of her most curious hit, "Is That All There Is?"  A charting number in a year in which the competition was deathless numbers of the ilk of  Lulu's "Boom Bang a Lang" or, at the other extreme, David Bowie exploring the universe in "Space Oddity," the song - unsettling, unsparing, brittle - would seem to be a long shot in the popularity stakes.

But it works, in spades.  Lee, at this point in her long career, is a daunting presence, totally in control even as she she seems on the edge of shattering.  It was a quality she retained to the end, when she was little more than a ruin tricked out in wig and caftan, carried on stage and deposited into the spotlight in ever smaller and more unforgiving rooms.  I last saw her a year or two before her curtain finally fell, but she still drove home every stage of this song's journey - fire, circus, love, the story of a life, really - and still made you want to break out the booze and have that ball...

I like that she shares her day with a survivor of a very different kind, an even more imposing self-creation: the Queen-Empress, dowager extraordinaire, superb creature who started out as a sort of semi-royal poor relation of Queen Victoria, but who ended up as the grandmother of the current occupant of Victoria's throne - Queen Mary.  I have long had a soft spot for that unapproachable grande dame, and I like to think that, while she  might not have approved quite entirely of "Fever" or "Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)" (the latter of which, by the bye, Peg not only sang, but wrote - she was a good songwriter on top of everything else), she might have felt a pang of recognition, had she had the chance to hear "Is That All There Is?"  She had, heaven knows, seen her share of fires and circuses.

Gloriana 2.0

Sixty years today; hard to imagine it, doing that job, day in, day out for 60 years. Let alone doing it so very well. Say what you will, she has a marvelous smile.

Her mother, of course, was famous for hers. I've always found it a rather practiced smile, determined to charm, at its least successful verging on the fixed.

No, I think the Queen's is more like that of her grandmother, the redoubtable Queen Mary. It's altogether a less predictable phenomenon, but all the more endearing for it.

One can't, I suppose, wish her sixty more. You know what I do wish, though? That she's with us for a good long time, long enough to see her first-born's first-born have his first. And that that child is a girl, the first ever British heiress apparent. She'd have a thing or two to learn from her great granny...

Birthday Girl: The May Queen

On this day in 1867, in a grace-and-favour apartment at Kensington Palace, a little girl was born to the vast Princess Mary Adelaide, a granddaughter of George III, and her rather musical-comedy looking little husband, Prince Franz of Teck.

The Tecks were an improvident couple, and their daughter grew into a solemn and serious girl who was shuttled from house to house as her parents (who eventually more or less fled to Italy) avoided creditors and increasingly irritated relatives, including Mary Adelaide's formidable cousin, Queen Victoria.

Despite this less-than-ideal upbringing, the little girl - called May, after her birth month, and certainly less of a mouthful than her given names, Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes - grew into a serious, intelligent, and not at all unattractive young princess.

She entered the Royal Marriage Mart not once, but twice, having lost her first fiancé, the distinctly unpromising Duke of Clarence (the heir to the heir) to flu before being snatched up by the Duke of York (his brother's replacement in the succession as well as at the altar).

And so she lived happily ever after.

She became the stately creature known as Queen Mary, possessor of the most fabulous collection of jewellery and bibelots in the world, seen here in this rather alarming hand-colored portrait with her husband (who seems genuinely to have been the love of her life, at least after diamond-and-pearl stomachers), George V.

Although she shuffled off this mortal coil, at a venerable age and secure in the adoration of her people, nearly 60 years ago, Queen Mary left her mark on the world we live in today, for she was a formative influence in the life of the Queen who is still very much with us. The Queen used to take the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose on little educational outings, which were, one reads, as much looked forward to by the former as they were dreaded by the latter.

So, on her 143rd birthday, here's to May of Teck, the pauper-princess turned Empress of India. She was a good old girl and rock of stability through all her long life, as implacably Victorian on the day she died as she had been on the fine May morning that brought her into this world.