Mrs. Cobina Wright, a correspondent billed in the Journal-American as a Noted American Society Woman and Authoress, wrote in that editorially anti-British paper, after covering the royal wedding, “I am still breathless, but I will try to give a few of my impressions.” She then actually proceeded to give only a few—a column and a quarter, as against the four and three-quarter columns turned in by Mrs. Inez Robb, a Journal-American colleague. After reading Mrs. Wright, I was breathless, too, and after reading a mass of other stories about the wedding, I felt tremulous, radiant, and overwhelmed, all adjectives that sprouted on the carpet of nuptial prose like dandelions on a badly kept lawn. “3 Pages of Bridal Photos,” a streamer across the top of the front page of the Journal-American announced on the wedding day, in the red ink usually reserved for Congressional investigations. Under it, black headlines said:
The McCormick-Patterson Daily News, which has been trying to save America from British guile since 1940, unbent just as handsomely. The News’ Nancy Randolph even scored a partial beat on what kind of bed linen had been provided for the couple’s wedding night. The Hearst and McCormick papers reminded me of the old song about the Irishman in London who “saw England’s King” and who “cheered—God forgive me—I cheered with the rest.”
Mrs. Wright, I thought, had a definite edge on all the other dealers in radiance. Her stories, which ran for several days, appeared in the Mirror mornings and in the Journal-American evenings. The morning and evening versions were not quite identical. She began her story in the Mirror on November 21st, for example, “Today came one of the greatest thrills of my life in sitting in Westminster Abbey as a personal guest of the bridegroom to watch the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh.” The story carried a November 20th dateline. In the Journal-American the same day, the dateline was November 21st and the story began, “Yesterday came one of the greatest thrills of my life,” etc. It was only in the Journal story, however, that Mrs. Wright reported herself breathless. In both papers, she confided, “Usually I feel sad at weddings, but this one seemed so right it gave me a feeling of joy and uplift. . . . It was really like any well-arranged ceremony in an American small town except that Westminster Abbey is more imposing than cathedrals along Main Street and the audience was composed of most of Europe’s royalty and nobility. . . . I really felt a lump in my throat when I noticed Queen Mary putting her handkerchief to her eyes. . . . Queen Elizabeth never looked lovelier in a gown of beige lamé with embroidery around the elbows and sleeves.” That day’s morning, or Mirror, Wright story went more deeply into English history than the evening, or Journal, narrative. “By coincidence Bea Lillie and Noel Coward were seated at the foot of a statue of Lord Peel, the distinguished ancestor of Bea’s deceased husband, Lord Peel,” Mrs. Wright noted in the Mirror, and continued, “I think the high point on this historic occasion came for me when the 28 trumpeters gave a fanfare at the end of the ceremony. Hearing this centuries-old musical tribute to royalty while sitting in ancient Westminster Abbey witnessing the marriage of Britain’s future monarch, I got a warm realization of what a great link with the past is represented by the throne and what a host of kings and queens had been in this abbey. It was a sober and awe-inspiring reflection.” Miss Rebecca West, in the Herald Tribune, wrote that the fanfare had been devised especially for this wedding by the musicians of the Abbey, a feat which, in Miss West’s opinion, made them the equal of medieval stonemasons.
The two Lord Peels had disappeared by the time the Journal story went to press, and so had Miss Lillie and Mr. Coward, but in their place there was a new paragraph: “When Philip entered the Abbey I could see right over his shoulder the splendid bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It gave me a thrill to realize this American poet is enshrined in this hallowed spot.” The bust seemed to provide a satisfactory raison d’être for the Abbey, from a Hearst point of view; it had been built as a memorial to an American poet. Mrs. Wright’s tribute to royalty, which might have been construed as an endorsement of the monarchic principle, had been replaced by the simple statement “I was indeed privileged and I am humbly grateful. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.”
Extraordinary as Mrs. Wright’s wedding story was, it did not equal the pre-nuptial one she had written for both Mirror and Journal about a do at the home of the bride’s parents. It is impossible to remain for a protracted period at the same high pitch, and Mrs. Wright may, like an overtrained boxer, have left her fight in the gymnasium. At any rate, she was better in her last workout than when she had that radiant bride directly in front of her. “One of the most gorgeous sights I have ever seen in my life was the truly magnificent reception given by Their Majesties the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace last night,” the Journal-American version of the story about the party began. “I did not realize there was so much splendor left in this battered old world. And do you know, I was so overwhelmed by the size and beauty of the jewels worn by the women present that I can scarcely remember so much as the color or cut of a single gown I saw.” Contending heroically against this handicap, Mrs. Wright then managed to recall that Queen Elizabeth had worn a gown of “oyster white satin with a very bouffant skirt in which panels or paillettes were set in. . . . I thought she looked perfectly beautiful. Her innate sweetness would melt a heart of stone,” and that Miss Sharman Douglas, daughter of the American Ambassador, had worn “deep green velvet with an off-shoulder neckline and a bouffant skirt.” When Mrs. Wright got to Queen Mary, she was put off by an additional distraction, as if the jewels weren’t bad enough. “I was so entranced by the beauty of character stamped on her face,” she wrote, “that I have only a vague recollection that she wore a gray-blue pailletted dress with the kingfisher blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter.” The younger Elizabeth, according to Mrs. Wright, “is divinely pretty. She looked fresh and dewy as ever last night despite the great burden of royal wedding preparations.” Mrs. Wright then went on to say, “One of the persons I ran into at the reception was Lady Astor. In a white gown with a great coronet and other matching diamonds, she was one of the most distinguished-looking women I have ever seen. . . . Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia wore the most beautiful emeralds, all the size of pigeon’s eggs, that I have ever seen.”
As if to provide a counterpoint to stories like Mrs. Wright’s and Miss West’s more stately panegyric in the Herald Tribune, there was something of a competition among the papers in applying to the wedding story what might be called the common touch, which in some instances could hardly have been commoner. Walter Winchell had launched the intimate phase of the campaign a week or so before the wedding by quoting a woman he knew as saying that “the girls are built like their mother,” etc. “Watch tomorrow’s Mirror for a ringside seat at today’s colorful wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lt. Philip Mountbatten,” the Mirror said in a house ad on the wedding morning. The News’ Nancy Randolph reported, “The Princess was to sleep tonight [her wedding night] between pink silk crepe de chine sheets and rest her royal head on matching pillowcases appliquéd with satin leaves. . . . To the relief of the housekeeper, who feared the pink silk sheets might not be liked by the bride, Elizabeth exclaimed: ‘How lovely it is to be here!’ . . . In the attic above them, a Scotland Yard operative was assigned a makeshift bed. At all times he must be within call of the royal pair.” The Mirror’s honeymoon correspondent, Fred Doerflinger, had the story of the sheets, but he was scooped on the pillowcase appliqué.
The sidelight type of story, filled with cheery Cockney quotations, was also in considerable evidence in the city’s press. After reading only two days’ accounts, I have spots in front of my eyes, which I suspect are dropped “h”s. “ ‘Gord,’ said a starry-eyed Cockney girl [in the Post], ‘but ain’t ’ e the ’andsome one. I can’t say I blame ’er for being daft about him at all.’ ” This sounded to me as if I had heard it before, perhaps when the then Prince of Wales was squiring Mrs. Simpson, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the fact that one initial “h” had been left in: why hadn’t the reporter written about ’im”? A think like that will sometimes bother me for days.
The editors of four New York papers had the same idea for a feature story: that there must be humbler couples getting married on the day Liz and Phil (to employ the new headline nomenclature) were married, and that a certain volume of human interest, either mildly or strongly diluted with social criticism, according to the paper’s position, could be milked out of a contrast between their social circumstances and the Mountbattens’. PM ran a story and photograph strip on the wedding of Susie Occhione, 28, a packer in a garment factory, and Salvatore Errico, same age, a boxmaker. “There was no champagne, no six-foot-three-inch-high wedding cake,” PM commented starkly. The Post carried stories about two other couples, one here and one in London. The Post’s New York couple, Henry Price and Corrine Hirscher, were depressed; Miss Hirscher’s parents didn’t want them to marry because they were of different religions—a kind of “Gentleman’s Agreement” angle with a twist, as any up-to-the-minute assistant city editor could figure. The Post’s British couple couldn’t have a church wedding because they didn’t have enough clothing coupons between them to get the girl a wedding dress. A Mirror editor’s first idea about such a story is to take the principals to a restaurant or night club (on the cuff), where they can be photographed at a table. The Mirror accordingly conveyed its couple—Frank Tamburrino and Lillian Gootar, both 24, a bartender and masseuse, respectively—to the Waldorf and the Latin Quarter before sending them home to the Bronx. “Mr. and Mrs. Tamburrino were taken in a taxi (remember, this was a time for celebration) to the Waldorf,” the Mirror reporter wrote, two columns to the right of a photograph captioned “Happily holding hands, Frank and Lillian use the subway for trip to the Waldorf-Astoria for their wedding feast.” This is one the reporter will have to straighten out with the auditor.
The Daily Worker ran a three-column headline across its front page:
and then carried another, halfway down the page: “Princess Elizabeth Weds Prince Philip—see Page 3.” None of this “Phil and Liz” stuff even for a day—the Worker never drops its guard—but a clear implication that the parasites were less important than eighteen other couples. The symbolism would have been better, I thought, if the Worker had put Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on Page 15. It followed through on one of the American couples, telling the story of their wedding day and ending with “They returned to the apartment of the bride’s family, where her mother greeted the newlyweds with: ‘The folding bed came from the store. We’ll put it up in the kitchen tonight.’ There were no gifts from the White House.”
I cannot account for the World Telegram’s missing out on this fairly obvious feature idea, made to order for its heart-throb experts, except on the ground that it is afraid of being lured again into following the Communist line. It appears, in the light of a dispatch in the Herald Tribune two weeks ago, that the Telegram, by publishing a series of articles criticizing the luxurious living of officers in Italy, had been following the line. Major General Manton S. Eddy, according to the Tribune, informed reporters in Washington that criticism of the officer corps was sinister and Communist-inspired. We may expect greater circumspection from the World Telegram hereafter.
The straight news stories of the wedding were, at their flattest, unobjectionable and, at their best, rather interesting. Herbert Matthews’ dispatch in the Times and Frederick Kuh’s in PM were, as one might have expected, comprehensive and workmanlike, as far as telling about what actually happened went. From what they and all the other correspondents reported, I’d judge that the enthusiasm in London was real and was extensive. I thought, however, that the vast wordage each account dedicated to the mishap of a wretched little boy who almost fell over Elizabeth’s train during the ceremony was a tipoff on how desperate most of the reporters must have been.
Concurrently with news of the final preparations for the wedding, the Herald Tribune ran a dispatch from Paris stating that the Count of Paris, the Pretender to the French throne, had renounced his claims, since he believed there was no future in the king business. ♦
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