The Press: Goo and Goo-Goo

Not since the Gould millions were real and awe-inspiring and Anna, heiress to a portion of the same, was wedded to Count Boni de Castellane, in the days when William Randolph Hearst vied with Joseph Pulitzer in New York journalism, has an equal amount of goo and goo-goo stickled the pages of newspapers in an Anglo-Saxon country as is being poured out over this marriage of an experienced man of nearly 32 and an extremely modern young woman whose royal family has been exiled by the country it formerly ruled.

Thus, with his reporter’s gorge rising, Correspondent Frederick T. Birchall of the New York Times tucked the feelings of most of his fraternity into the middle of some seven columns of “goo and goo-goo” which he himself was obliged to write last week about the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina.

City editors, hewing to the line that no human interest story can touch a royal bride, agreed with Associated Press that “one of the biggest events of the past 25 years had taken place.” On the wedding morn Baltimore’s sardonic Sun was almost alone in jibing: “Definition of an Anglophile: an American who gets up at 5 a. m. to hear the wedding broadcast.” Observed the New York Herald Tribune wistfully: “There is a wonderfully impressive quality about all that pageantry—the great names and glittering uniforms, the thousands of wedding gifts, the huge wedding cake, the city alive with colors, the enormous grandstands prepared beside the Abbey, Bond Street roofed with paper wedding bells, the Royal Navy dressing its ships and firing its salutes around the world.”

Smash headlines as the great day advanced:

ONTARIO GIRL BORN DURING BROADCAST IS NAMED MARINA

LONDON NAVAL TALK HALTS FOR WEDDING

HITLER SENDS HIS BLESSING

KING GEORGE GETS FLUSTERED

MARINA’S WEDDING GOWN LIKE A FAIRY-TALE ROBE

750 HURT IN WEDDING CROWD TEN TAKEN TO HOSPITALS; TWO SUFFER BROKEN LEGS

GUESTS WILL EAT PHEASANTS SHOT BY KING; 800-POUND CAKE AT WEDDING BREAKFAST

ROYALTIES TOSS HORSESHOES AND SLIPPERS AS COUPLE START ON WEDDING TRIP

DISCORDANT NOTE STRUCK BY LONDON “DAILY WORKER”

Not merely discordant but downright discourteous, London’s Communist Daily Worker took this ultimate liberty with Britain’s sacrosanct right of free speech: “OUT-OF-WORK PRINCESS SIGNS ON FOR DOLE. You Pay For Her Wedding Bells! Today Marina, daughter of an unemployed ‘Greek’ former Prince, marries George, son of the head of the most prosperous branch of the firm of Royalty Unlimited — the Buckingham Palace branch of the old German family concern which supplies Europe with unwanted monarchs. . . . Swarms of these poor relations of the Royal Rabbit Warren are now in London, luxuriating in luscious pastures. Not one of the gang is engaged in any useful or productive occupation. Consequently all their keep has to be provided by the British masses.”

At the other extreme hawk-nosed Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, was hired by a U. S. syndicate as their super-sob-sister:

“I have attended many state ceremonies in Westminster Abbey, but what differentiated this from other great weddings was that everyone felt that on this occasion they were witnessing a marriage of love.

“Love can never be harnessed and can seldom be controlled. It is the mainspring of life, the conqueror of death, and the flame of a heart which no draft can put out. Love acts as a sort of dynamite in body and soul—it explodes itself. . . .

“As they passed me, these two young people who had married for love, there flashed through my mind those wonderful words from the Song of Solomon: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his.'”