Foreign News: A Ring for Cinderella

Britain’s King George III once let his heavy Teutonic eyes wander sheeplike in the direction of a lovely, unpredictable minx named Lady Sarah Lennox. For political reasons he could not marry her, had to settle instead for a mousy, home-loving German princess, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Later, when George’s younger brothers Gloucester and Cumberland married their own lights-of-love without so much as a by-your-leave, George was furious and had Parliament pass the Royal Marriage Act of 1772. It has provided ever since that George’s descendants may not marry without first asking the consent of the reigning monarch. For though Britons love ardor, they love order even more.

Cheers for Honneybun. Last week they got both. As wedding bells rang out for royalty once again, sentimental London celebrated as it can only when romance is coupled with propriety. Two months ago King George VI, in answer (it was said) to the pleas of his sister, the Princess Royal, had granted permission for her music critic son, George Henry Hubert Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, to marry pretty Marion Stein, whose father fled from Vienna in 1938 because he was part Jewish. On their wedding day last week, well-wishers by the thousands thronged the streets outside St. James’s Palace for a glimpse of the young groom, who met his bride, an ambitious pianist, at a music festival at Aldeburgh. Others flocked to Kensington to mill about the streets outside the bride’s own modest third-story flat and to coo at one another over the wonder of this sad-eyed Cinderella who was to marry a king’s nephew. So great was the enthusiasm all around that even Henry Honneybun, a bakery driver who had been the earl’s batman during the war, got a rousing cheer when he left for the festivities.

At Mayfair’s fashionable St. Mark’s Church on North Audley Street where the ceremony took place, musical bigwigs like Sir Thomas Beecham rubbed elbows with Britain’s royal dukes & duchesses and 200 stout Yorkshiremen from the village of Harewood, who had come up to town in Sunday best to salute their young landlord. As the bridal automobile swept away from the St. James’s Palace reception that followed, a single tiny Cinderella-like silver slipper could be seen bobbing in the dust behind.

A Mate for Toodie. Plain Londoners slipped around a corner to drop a sentimental tear into a cool pint, and Mayfair retired to its cocktails to discuss another Cinderella. She was a pretty, Boston-bred,

New York divorcée whose engagement to another great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria’s had just been announced. Her name alone was enough to make Mayfair gasp—it was Mrs. Simpson. This time, however, there was no danger that a romance would rock a throne. Romaine Simpson had no connection with Wally, Duchess of Windsor. Her fiance, handsome David Michael Mountbatten, did not have to ask his cousin George’s permission to marry. The Marriage Act makes an exception of the offspring of princesses who marry into foreign families. Milford Haven’s royal great-grandmother, the daughter of Victoria, had married Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. “Naturally,” the marquess said last week, “I wrote the King as a matter of courtesy.”

Mayfair had kept a weather eye on young Milford Haven ever since Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, when he served as best man. An internationally eligible bachelor who in recent years had divided his time between London nightclubs and the sale of radiators in the U.S., the young marquess had amply rewarded the scrutiny by providing Mayfair with its best gossip. Sometime ago one of his showgirl friends shocked London by climbing into the coronation chair at Westminster Abbey for a publicity gag. Several weeks ago the enterprising peer titillated the town again and got his latest business off to a good start by sending out invitations that read: “The Marquess of Milford Haven invites your company at the opening of a new launderette in Hammersmith.” He avoided the ever-present snares of bachelordom on both sides of the Atlantic. “I steered clear of dowagers who might have had ideas,” he explains.

In pretty “Toodie” Simpson, the bachelor met his match. Ever since her schooldays (at Virginia’s fashionable, horsy Foxcroft), according to one of her friends, Toodie “had only one concern—to get married.” She wore huge gold earrings in a gypsy style and had frizzy black hair. The effect, said her friend, was rather too exotic for an 18-year-old and somehow she “scared the boys away.” Nevertheless, in 1946 Toodie married William Simpson, the son of a Chicago millionaire. Last year they were divorced. Now a sleek, mature 26 who “can afford a suit or two from Schiaparelli once a year but that’s all,” Toodie is no longer so scary. In any case, says her fiance, “U.S. girls are more lovely to look at than British girls.”