How the Queen sabotaged my passionate affair with her
cousin: Zsuzsi Starkloff tells the story of how Prince William of Gloucester
fell for her and scandalised the royals in the process
By
CHRISTOPHER WILSON
PUBLISHED:
23:52 GMT, 24 August 2012 | UPDATED: 23:54 GMT, 24 August 2012
Forty years
on, she still wears the prince’s ring on a chain around her neck, its weight
and royal insignia a daily reminder of what might have been.
She could
have married into the Royal Family, but instead she lives a modest existence on
a mountain-top in Colorado, many thousands of miles from the world and the
intrigues of the House of Windsor which caused her downfall.
Otherwise,
Hungarian-born Zsuzsi Starkloff could have been Duchess of Gloucester, with a
sprawling estate in Northamptonshire and a grace-and-favour apartment in
Kensington Palace. Her natural modesty and cool good looks would have won her
many admirers and a place in the nation’s heart.
Instead,
the unseen forces of the Establishment and a fatal plane crash put paid to a
love which, though it remained largely secret, shook the royal court to its
core.
Today,
surrounded by mementos and photographs of her ill-starred affair, 78-year-old
Mrs Starkloff has broken her decades-long silence to talk to the Mail about the
love of her life.
In August,
1972, her lover, the spectacularly handsome Prince William of Gloucester, died
instantly, aged just 30, when his Piper Arrow light aircraft stalled on a tight
turn in an air race and crashed to the ground.
A grandson
of King George V, he was the Queen’s first cousin and the most dazzling royal
of his generation.
Clever,
cool, athletic and muscular, William was a hero-figure to the young Prince
Charles, who modelled himself on his older cousin and, ten years later, named
his first-born after him.
But despite
his natural gifts, the prince’s one fatal flaw was that he had fallen for an
older woman who was both a divorcee and a foreigner. The prince could have
anything he wanted in life, but not her.
For the
powers-that-be at Buckingham Palace had already labelled Zsuzsi Starkloff ‘the
new Mrs Simpson’ (after the American divorcee whose affair with Edward VIII
triggered the Abdication Crisis in 1938) and were out to break the romance in
any way they could.
The rules
surrounding royalty back in the 1970s were very different. On the plus side,
Prince William took his royal position extremely seriously. For him, the idea
of being caught with his trousers down, a la Prince Harry, would be repugnant.
On the
minus side, the nation’s first family was propped up by a cant and hypocrisy
which extended all the way up to the Queen herself.
In 1972,
William’s clear intention to wed a divorcee was greeted with apoplectic horror,
and yet only six years later his cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, did just that,
marrying a Czech-born divorcee with the full approval of the Queen and court,
and turning the former Marie-Christine von Reibnitz into Princess Pushy.
Today, Mrs
Starkloff looks back with a surprising lack of rancour at the way she was
forced out of her lover Prince William’s life.
She says:
‘He explained to me that it was his family’s fear that he would be likened to
the Duke of Windsor. They wanted an end to the affair.’
Quite how
unreasonable this presumption was can be seen by comparing the two men.
The former
Duke of Windsor (William’s uncle) was already on the throne as Edward VIII when
the Mrs Simpson affair became a public scandal, while the younger man, as a
junior prince, had no chance of ever succeeding to the Throne. And whereas
Edward VIII put his woman before duty, William, as we shall see, tried and
tried to put duty before the woman.
‘William
had a huge loyalty to his family — he wanted to do the right thing — and of
course I supported him in that,’ says Mrs Starkloff, lightly shrugging off the
Mrs Simpson parallel. ‘He had to make up his own mind, and he did that without
influence from me.’
The couple
met when William, aged 27 and on attachment to the Foreign Office, was working
as a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Tokyo.
Tall, slim
and beguilingly charming, he’d had a string of girlfriends but became smitten
by Zsuszi, a Hungarian ex-model, after the pair met at a party.
Having been
only briefly introduced, Zsuzsi next day sent her chauffeur to the embassy with
a note saying: ‘Dear Prince Charming, I have a slipper missing. Would you like
to come to a party?’
‘He was
quite a man,’ recalls Mrs Starkloff. ‘He was very manly, very passionate. And
mature beyond his years.’
From the
start, the prince was transfixed. He wrote home to his parents, the Duke and
Duchess of Gloucester, asking what their reaction would be if he proposed
marriage.
‘They were
against it,’ Zsuzsi says. ‘It came as no shock to me. I was seven years older
than William for a start, divorced, and a different religion. I knew it was
doomed.’ Even so, still he persevered.
His old
schoolfriend, Giles St Aubyn, recalled: ‘She was witty, intelligent,
attractive. William sparkled in her company.
‘But the
relationship overshadowed everything else. It resulted in a period of great
anguish for him, for it involved him in disagreements with his friends and
family.’
One friend
from that time, businessman Shigeo Kitano, recalls seeing the couple together:
‘Prince William was obviously deeply in love with her. She was very beautiful,
with large brown eyes and long auburn hair. When she smiled, she had a big
dimple.
‘She was a
good dresser and carried herself gracefully. She conversed in flawless Japanese
and was clearly a very clever woman.’
The romance
increased in pace over two years, but while courtiers were happy for the prince
to sow his wild oats when abroad, they were increasingly nervous about what
would happen when his tour of duty was over.
Pressure
started to mount on him to dump his girlfriend, among whose sins — apart from
being twice-married —was that she was the mother of two small children. There
was also the tricky business, for bigoted courtiers anyway, of her being
Jewish.
These
points were brought home forcefully during the prince’s time in Japan by his
boss, Sir John Pilcher, the British Ambassador.
Sir John
had been encouraged to report back to London on the prince’s relationship, a
task in which he took evident relish.
‘I soon
heard that delectable feminine presence was frequently to be discovered in
Prince William’s home,’ Pilcher smoothly purred. ‘We thought it wise of him to
be attached to such an attractive and adult person.’
In fact,
this was diplomatic double-speak. What he actually meant was that it was fine
for a woman to take care of the prince’s passionate needs, but at no time
should she be mistaken for wifely material.
In the
language of the seasoned diplomat, Sir John went on: ‘Left to his own devices,
the Prince needed a degree of prompting. He was immensely good-natured and took
in remarkably good part the observations I felt bound to make.
‘This was
notably the case when I had to point out the constitutional and diplomatic
service aspects of marrying a foreigner. He undertook to pause and think.’
Put in
everyday language, the prince had been leaned on. Hiding his disappointment, he
secretly ventured to get the love of his life accepted by the Royal Family.
An
opportunity arose when the Queen despatched her sister, Princess Margaret, to
Japan, apparently on official duties but also to look Mrs Starkloff over.
The
princess and the divorcee were introduced, and Zsuzsi now recalls: ‘On the
surface she was friendly. She told William: “I’m not surprised you’re in love
with her” — and we all had dinner together.’
Within
days, though, Margaret had written to her cousin warning him off any
matrimonial plans.
She wrote:
‘I was so pleased to have the opportunity of a quick word with you. I do think
you would be wise to wait for a bit, and then come home and see how everything
looks.’
Margaret
went one step further, advising him to confide in his boss Sir John Pilcher — a
treacherous suggestion since the ambassador was reporting back to London on the
prince’s every move.
But it was
clear that Princess Margaret was not passing her own message to the Prince, but
that of the Queen.
Back in the
1970s, the Sovereign clearly still took the view that true love was the
implacable enemy of royalty — as it had seemed in the cases of her uncle, the
Duke of Windsor, and her sister Margaret (with her ill-fated affair with Group
Captain Townsend).
William, it
was clear, must not be allowed to follow suit.
None of
this, though, made any difference to the prince. He decided, against all
advice, to bring Zsuzsi home to England.
She
recalls: ‘He organised a trip to Scotland to visit his uncle, the Duke of
Buccleuch, and we spent some time there before going to the Prince’s country
home, Barnwell. His father had suffered a stroke and was very ill. He was in a
wheelchair.
‘I had a
wonderful welcome from the Duchess (of Gloucester). She was warm and friendly,
sitting with her flowers and her needlework, and we chatted. But she was very
reserved and it was hard to know what she was really thinking.’
Much the
same as all the other royals, no doubt? ‘She didn’t show it, but I’m sure that
it was there,’ says Mrs Starkloff.
By this time
the relationship had become public knowledge, and reports circulated that
during her six-week stay in Britain, Mrs Starkloff had met the Queen.
In fact,
nothing could have been less likely. Her Majesty kept her distance and made it
known she wanted an end to the affair.
And she got
it. William finally caved in to family pressure, and with Zsuzsi in New York
for family reasons, he called a halt.
Yet it was
still far from over.
With his
father now ailing, Prince William was encouraged to abandon his diplomatic
career and return to Northamptonshire to tend the family estate. That way, an
eye could be kept on him.
But as a
ruse, it only partially worked.
Soon he had
gone to America, where he and his lover were reunited. ‘We got an aircraft and
we flew around together, or drove,’ she recalls. ‘We went to California to see
some of my friends, then travelled on through the United States and Hawaii.
‘We did a
lot of wonderful things together on this journey across the country, and for
the most part he wasn’t recognised. I think he relished the anonymity. It was
wonderful for him not to be bothered by people.
‘Maybe he
saw another life ahead for him during our time together, I don’t know.’
He’d told
courtiers that while away in America, he was not to be disturbed. But before
long he received a cable from the Queen, ordering him to represent her at the
independence celebrations of the South Pacific archipelago of Tonga.
The royal machine
was determined to maintain its grip — reminding him who he was and the job he
had been born into.
But still
he loved Zsuzsi. ‘It was a relationship of trust,’ she says now. ‘It certainly
developed into a near-perfect relationship.’
Forced back
to England, Prince William once again appeared to have submitted to demands to
cool the relationship.
But had he?
‘The eerie thing is that he wrote me a letter just before he died,’ says Mrs
Starkloff. ‘In it, he said he wanted to come to New York and talk to me, to see
if there was something we could do. He wanted us to be together.’
Mrs
Starkloff is in no doubt that, having twice apparently deserted her, it was now
William’s intention to show his commitment by proposing marriage.
However, it
was not to be. On August 28, 1972, he climbed into the pilot’s seat of his
Piper Cherokee Arrow at an air race near Wolverhampton in the West Midlands,
and perished when his plane crashed and burst into flames within minutes of
take-off.
He died
wearing a replica of the ring that he gave Zsuzsi — made for him by craftsmen
at her special request.
Two years
later, when his father died, the royal dukedom that should have come to him
passed instead to his younger brother, Richard.
What caused
the pilot error which took the life of both Prince William and his co-pilot
Vyrell Mitchell will never be known.
He was
known to be extremely agitated about the continued enforced separation between
him and Zsuzsi Starkloff.
‘Perhaps my
fondest memory is of a formal dinner, with many tables,’ she says now. ‘We had
only met once before. He walked slowly across the room and came up to me and
asked: “May I borrow Cinderella for a dance?”
‘He died wearing my ring. And I still think about him every day
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