GREAT BRITAIN: Marina

¶ Sad-eyed President Albert Lebrun sped her away from “home” (Paris) in his private car, with a French gendarme stiff at attention every kilometer all the way to Calais.

¶ Shameless hawkers in the Gare du Nord sold what they said were scraps of cloth from her trousseau.

¶ She paid customs duties at Dover on her $20,000 Paris clothes. “I packed them myself. I love to touch them! They are so beautiful. I was so excited I got up at 4 o’clock this morning!”

¶ The Duke of Kent, kissing her on both cheeks at Victoria Station after first kissing her mother’s hand: “I do hope your journey has been good, Mara* dear.”

¶ King George and the Prince of Wales kissed her hand. After curtsying, she kissed Queen Mary and the Duchess of York.

¶ She had her own cream-and-gold three-room suite at Buckingham Palace, with her parents next door in four rooms, her sisters upstairs.

¶ To make the wedding at Westminster Abbey on America’s Thanksgiving Day less severely formal, the Lord Chamberlain permitted male guests to wear their trousers, in the event that they possessed no court breeches.

¶ No. 1 of the eight bridesmaids: dumpling Crown Princess Juliana of The Netherlands, placid last week amid spiteful Mayfair gossip that she tried in vain for Prince George last summer.

No. 2 bridesmaid: George V’s favorite granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth “who looks as much like Queen Mary as a child of six possibly can.”

No. 3 bridesmaid: Beauteous Grand Duchess Kyra Kyrilovna, daughter of His Majesty the Orthodox and Pious and Christ Loving, the Absolute Autocrat and Great Lord, Kyril Alexandrovich, Emperor of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan,—if Josef Stalin would only let him.

¶ Guest Kings: Norway’s tall, brooding Haakon VII and Denmark’s taller, cheerful Christian X.

¶ Guest pretenders: Russia’s Kyril and Greece’s George II.

¶ Exalted absentees: homespun Governor General Donal Buckley of the Irish Free State who sent his rugged regrets; and Rumania’s buck-toothed Hohenzollern, the bride’s “Uncle Carol” who fumed in Bucharest because he was not invited, sent no wedding present.

As a further snub to Scapegrace Carol II, George V. who detests “that bounder,” caused to be invited Carol’s cast-off wife, Her Majesty Helen of Greece and Rumania who resides in England.*

¶ Emolument of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, the Most Rev. Dr. Cosmo Gordon Lang for his reading of the Angelican service “to love, cherish and obey”: £1,000 ($5.000).

¶ For the second marriage, necessitated by Marina’s Greek Orthodox faith, solid gold vessels and nuptial crowns were provided in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace. Undisclosed was the emolument of gorgeously robed and perfumed Archimandrite Germanos for his “Oh Lord our God, crown them with glory and honor!”

¶ Marina’s old English nanny, Miss Kate Fox: “I wouldn’t say she was very good or very naughty as a child. But she was unusually beautiful and sweet natured. She will be a happy woman when all this celebrating is over and she and the Duke can enjoy the peace and quiet of their honeymoon at Himly Hall.”

¶ To make sure of a happy honeymoon at vast, forbidding Himly Hall (lent by the Earl of Dudley) Modern Bride Marina ordered sent out from London for projection at the Hall, a selection of lively films, including Mickey Mouse.

*First use of his pet name for her in public. *Though no longer Queen she retains by a legal settlement the title of Her Majesty.