The Windsors in Washington

A British correspondent in Washington cabled his London office: What coverage wanted on visit of Windsors? Answer came: "Leave to agencies unless essential." A U.S. newshawk asked the Londoner what he would consider "essential." He answered: "I would say that if they were run over, that would be essential."

The British were plainly no longer interested in their onetime King. This emeritus royalty was still a national embarrassment, but a fainter one. The British Embassy carefully pointed out that the Embassy dinner for the Windsors would be "medium-sized and private." The White House took this cue: the Duke and Duchess were invited only to a lunch with the President--almost the minimum courtesy permissible by diplomatic protocol. When the death of the President's brother-in-law, G. Hall Roosevelt (see p. 17), made it necessary to cancel even this courtesy, a Presidential handshake was substituted. Their only formal Washington appearances were at receptions by the press clubs.

But to the mass of U.S. citizenry the Windsors were still romantically interesting human beings, a champagne-bubble couple, the slightly moth-eaten Prince Charming, the fading Juliet.

They arrived in Washington with equerries, maids, a Scotland Yardsman, three Cairn terriers--Delto, Breezy and Pooky --106 pieces of luggage. They were prepared to be met by official lukewarmth, unprepared for a tumultuous, sigh-heaving, welcome-shouting crowd that followed them hour by hour. Both were sartorially splendid; both made Protean clothes-changes. The Duchess had her hair done by Hairdresser Emile on one side and Emile Jr. on the other. The Emiles reported no grey hairs on either side; achieved a soft upsweep wave over the ears that fetched applause from newshens. The Duke, wrote the male press, looked 20 years younger than his 47. The Duchess, while not photogenic, wrote the feminine press, was much more attractive than her 45. The scurrying, roaring crowds saw little but a flash of a bareheaded, blond little man in a grey suit getting in & out of cars, saw only the waved hand of Wallis Windsor of Baltimore, who almost became Queen of England.

No one penetrated their official masks of smiles and graciousness: no one knew the Duchess' thoughts as she whirled through the streets she had not seen for years, looking for vanished landmarks; or the Duke's as he entered the White House where "Silent Cal" Coolidge once volubly tried to relieve his shyness; or whether he remembered the Library of Congress, where once, with an injured arm, he shook hands for hours with thousands of people until, the pain becoming unbearable, he quietly excused himself, went behind a screen and fainted. Then he had been the coming King-Emperor, toasted, courted, toadied to as no other man has been in the 20th Century; now he was a lonely exile, Governor of The Bahamas, flyspeck-islands important chiefly to another country than his own. He told the National Press Club:

". . . One serves wherever one is told, and although it is a very different post to the ones I held in the first World War, I have applied myself ... to the best of my ability."

Next day, like every dutiful visitor to Washington, the Duke went to see the Lincoln Memorial, like every visitor read slowly to himself the stone-chiseled inscriptions, Lincoln's Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. That afternoon he and the Duchess, after two stiff little luncheons, one stuffy little dinner in the refrigerated privacy of the British Embassy, entrained for Chicago and for Calgary, Alberta, for the Edward Prince Ranch at High River, in the grand loneliness and peace of the Rocky Mountains. The minimum of officialdom saw them to the station.

But the people were there, thousands of them, jamming sidewalks, shoving at barriers, roaring farewell.

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