The Hot Breath of Gossip

No household in the world is more subject to the hot breath of gossip than Britain's House of Windsor. Last week the mongering winds were howling louder around Buckingham Palace than they had since the day of Wallis Warfield Simpson and Edward VIII.

The first flurry of tongues was all about Lieut. Commander Michael Parker, wartime shipmate, good friend and private secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh. Last week a London newspaper reported what palace officials had known for six months --that Mike and his wife were separating. Gossipists were prompt to link Parker's name (without foundation) to that of another woman, and the news was duly radioed to the royal yacht Britannia, on which both the Duke and Parker were approaching Gibraltar at the end of a four-month, globe-girdling tour of the Commonwealth. Soon afterward the palace announced that Parker had left his job, and the two old buddies said an unsmiling goodbye at Gibraltar.

Screams by Tea Time. Whether Parker had quit to protect the royal household, whether the Duke had sacked him, or whether the Queen had done the thing, no one would tell. Whatever the cause, the effect was a national wave of sentiment in favor of Mike Parker reminiscent of the emotional binge touched off two years ago by the unhappy romance of Princess Margaret and divorced commoner (and palace staffer) Peter Townsend. "Why," demanded Lord Beaverbrook's Express, for many years an ardent opponent of palace puritanism, "should a broken marriage be a disqualification for royal service? Until a few weeks ago the First Minister of the Queen [twice-married Sir Anthony Eden] was a man who had been through the divorce courts."

For all their black-type indignation about the plight of Commander Parker, the British press was slow to recognize the gossip about the royal couple themselves, in which Mike was involved at about the third-paragraph level. Out of London one day clacked a dispatch to the Baltimore Sun from Mayfair Set Correspondent Joan Graham, reporting that Britons were troubled by whispers "that the Duke of Edinburgh had more than a passing interest in an unnamed woman and was meeting her regularly in the apartment of the court photographer." By London's teatime the Sun's sensational story was splashed across U.S. newspaper front pages: REPORT QUEEN, DUKE IN RIFT OVER PARTY GIRL.

Chunks in the Casserole. The fact was that there has been a hum of gossip in Britain for years about the Duke's high jinks, particularly at parties given by his bohemian cronies of the Thursday Club, which included Parker. U.S. tabloid correspondents dug up "palace sources" who said that the royal household was disturbed about rip-roaring stag parties at the club, and had dropped Mike Parker so he would not be around to encourage the Duke to go Thursdaying. Other correspondents, however, found sources who said that the real trouble involved parties that were not always stag.

In this casserole of gossip were some tiny chunks of fact: the royal couple had not been together since mid-October when the Duke went on cruise; no royal child has been born since Elizabeth became Queen. In the teeth of the storm, royal spokesmen issued a firm denial of any rift between the Queen and her consort. This week Elizabeth plans to fly to Lisbon to join her husband for two days before they pay a state visit to Portugal. Soon the headlines were foreseeing a second honeymoon. In preparation the Duke shaved off the reddish, roguish beard he had cultivated during a six-week whisker-growing contest aboard the Britannia.

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