The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (55 page)

The following year, Elizabeth would return to the capital for the White House’s two-hundredth-anniversary dinner and to receive one of the nation’s highest honors, the Presidential Citizen’s Medal. Already one of the world’s most cherished and decorated celebrities, the French having made her a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1987, she was about to receive the ultimate accolade for a girl who’d been born in London and lived most of her life in the United States.
¹
In 2002, at the age of sixty-eight, she appeared on Queen Elizabeth II’s New Year’s Honors List, meaning that she was now a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire—Dame Elizabeth, OBE, a member of one of the highest orders of chivalry. “I’ve been a broad all my life, so a dame seemed a natural extension,” she remarked on hearing the news.
²
Despite her modesty, she knew it was one of the most singular of honors. When she grew up in Hollywood, there had been only one titled actress working in the American movie industry, Dame May Whitty, the venerable and kindly British expatriate with whom Elizabeth appeared in
Lassie Come Home
and
The White Cliffs of Dover
, in 1943 and 1944, respectively. In England, there was a handful of titled actresses and actors, including Flora Robson, Edith Evans, Wendy Hiller, Maggie Smith, Penelope Keith, Judi Dench, C. Aubrey Smith, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Richard Attenborough, Ben Kingsley, and Ian McKellan. What was so unique about Elizabeth joining their ranks was that she would be the sole American citizen among them. England, land of her birth, was saying it wanted to reclaim her as one of its own.

Chivalry originated in medieval days, during the reign of Edward III in 1327, when monarchs surrounded themselves with gallant warriors and powerful subjects in order to secure their hold on the crown. Knights formed into bands of brothers or, like monks, into orders. The oldest of these, the Order of the Garter, was created in 1348. The Order of the British Empire (OBE), formed centuries later, in WWI, was the first order to which all subjects, not just the rich, the military, or government officials, could conceivably aspire, and it included the Damehood, the first Knighthood for women.
³
Running all orders of chivalry, the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood is located behind St. James’s Palace and issues all decorations and medals, most of which cost around one hundred pounds each. Assistant Secretary Rachel Wells of the Chancery contacts recipients and invites them to an investiture. Usually the Queen performs the ceremony but sometimes it is the Prince of Wales or some other member of the Royal Family.
⁴
For her investiture, Elizabeth chose Tuesday morning, May 16, 2000.

Queen Elizabeth II, when asked what part of her job as monarch she held to be the most important, replied, “Investitures.”
⁵
Though the public is under the impression that the Queen personally selects Knights and Dames, this is not the case.
⁶
Lists are compiled by the Foreign Office (for diplomats); the Ministry of Defense (soldiers); and the Royal House hold (the Queen’s staff). Film-star nominations come from the Department of Culture, and the Health Department recommends doctors. Approximately a thousand recommendations come from the Ceremonial Office, which is a part of the Cabinet Office. Nominations also come from the public; thirty-five hundred names are sent in annually on forms provided by the government. Finally, eight screening committees are formed, and the heads of each become members of the Main Honors Committee, which is chaired by the head of the Civil Ser vice, Sir Gus O’Don-nell, and comes up with the final list. It then goes to the prime minister, who forwards it to the Queen. The Honors List on which Elizabeth appeared in 2000 contained 1,350 names, including Julie Andrews, Shakespearean actress Dorothy Tutin, and singer Shirley Bassey.

Elizabeth Taylor was no stranger to the England’s Royal Family. From her early childhood, thanks to Victor Cazalet, a Conservative MP, godson of Queen Victoria, and friend of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, tiny Elizabeth Taylor made her first visit to Buckingham Palace, where she presented a birthday gift to Dowager Queen Mary on her sixty-ninth birthday.
⁷
Elizabeth’s patron, Victor Cazalet, is a rather mysterious figure. A confirmed bachelor, he appears to have fallen in love with both of Elizabeth’s parents, showering largesse in the form of houses and cars. He and Elizabeth’s father Francis became inseparable,
⁸
prompting homosexual rumors, but others maintained he had a liaison with Elizabeth’s mother Sara.
⁹
This much is clear: Victor Cazalet so loved Elizabeth Taylor that he not only started her on a lifelong passion for horses and riding by giving her, when she was three, a horse named Betty; he established her so well in British society that almost three decades later, despite a string of recent scandals, she could boast of hobnobbing with Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the popular Queen of England during WWII and later the Queen Mother.

In 2009, author William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s official biographer, revealed that Her Royal Highness and Elizabeth dined together in the early 1960s at Fairlawne, the country estate of Victor Cazalet’s relative Peter, who was the Queen Mother’s favorite horse trainer.
¹⁰
The other guests at Fairlawne were playwright Noel Coward and historian Elizabeth Longford, author of
Wellington, Churchill
, and
Intimate Victorian Women
. Peter Cazalet had sixteen of the Queen Mother’s jumpers in training, and she had three winners at the Ashdown Handicap Chase in nearby Lingfield—Laffy, Double Star, and the Rip, whose mother was named Easy Virtue. HRH was “a good judge of horse-flesh,” and though she was a notorious tightwad and check walker, she was more inclined to pay her bills when she had a good year at the races. During her lifetime, she attended twenty house parties at Fairlawne, and whenever Noel Coward was present, there was always a sing-along around the piano, with Coward performing the Queen Mother’s favorite Coward parodies of British manners, “The Stately Homes of England,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.” In the 1930s, in a letter to Victor Cazalet, the Queen Mother had blamed the abdication of her brother-in-law the King of England on adultery and the low standards of his social circle,
¹¹
but although Noel was the jaded darling of that same circle—café society—she told Graham Payn, his longtime companion and executor, when she attended Coward’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1973, “I came because he was my friend.”
¹²

Just as Coward’s homosexuality
¹³
had not kept him from being knighted in 1970, Elizabeth’s unconventional life did not prevent the Royals from giving her a fine title and a public thank-you in 2000. Anticipating her investiture as a Dame Commander of the British Empire, she called it “the most exciting day of my life,” and arrived at London’s Dorchester Hotel with her four children—graying, forty-eight-year-old Michael and his wife Brooke; forty-six-year-old Christopher and wife Margi; forty-three-year-old Liza; and thirty-nine-year-old Maria—as well as her hairdresser, makeup artist, attorney, assistant Tim Mendelson, and twenty-four pieces of luggage.
¹⁴
“It’s the most exciting—and I do not exaggerate—day in my life,” she told reporters. “I had no inkling. It was just like, ‘
Whaaaat
?’ I can’t believe it. Me? Getting a Dameship [
sic
]?’ ”
¹⁵

On the morning of May 16, at Buck House, Elizabeth and Julie Andrews were among the hundred recipients who were to be invested that day. “Julie and I were glued at the hip out of pure nervousness and excitement,” Elizabeth later recalled. “I was so grateful to share that special day with her.” Both women were striking in their very different ways. Like all recipients, they’d been advised in advance of the dress code: “afternoon dress”—smart day clothes instead of gowns—for women and “morning clothes” for men.
¹⁶
Elizabeth had chosen a lavender embroidered-silk frock coat and pantaloons, and she was dripping jewels, including a heavy pearl necklace; self-designed Van Cleef & Arpels pearl-and-diamond earrings; and the Krupp diamond,
¹⁷
while Julie was more subdued in a pale pink two-piece suit.

Upon entering the Palace, they were immediately separated from their guests—three were allotted to each recipient—and the guests were taken in hand by Gentlemen Ushers, who showed them to their seats in the Ballroom, while the recipients retired to the Green Drawing Room and the Picture Gallery, famous for its priceless Old Masters, to meet with the Comptroller of the Household, who is in charge of investitures as the Queen’s master of ceremonies. Taking them through the ritual several times, he told them where to approach the monarch; how to greet Her Royal Highness; and where to go after their forty seconds with HRH. He tended to lecture the assembled luminaries as if they were children, later telling a journalist that Dame Maggie Smith, despite being drilled in protocol, “forgot which way to leave the stage when she collected her Damehood. A lot of them do, and the stars of stage and screen are usually the worst.”
¹⁸
With Elizabeth Taylor and Julie Andrews sitting directly in front of him, he probably realized he was in trouble—big-time.

Julie later recalled, “I didn’t think I was eligible as I’ve lived in America for such a long time, but I’ve always felt I’ve taken my Britishness with me.”
¹⁹
Elizabeth, born in London in 1932 to American parents, seemed even less eligible; she’d been in the U.S. since 1939 and was American to her fingertips. Over the years, she and Julie had sometimes competed for the same roles. “Get me
My Fair Lady
!” Elizabeth had once badgered Eddie Fisher;
²⁰
Julie, who’d originated the role on Broadway, longed to re create Eliza Doolittle on film, but both lost the part to Audrey Hepburn. Similarly, both had sought
Hello, Dolly!
but were trumped by Barbra Streisand. Julie had starred on Broadway with Richard Burton in
Camelot
before he fatefully left the show for Rome,
Cleopatra
, and Elizabeth. In the sensational aftermath, Julie treated her friend, Sybil Burton, Richard’s jilted wife, to a vampy imitation of Elizabeth. Lounging poolside with Sybil one day, “Julie jumped up, draped a towel over her body, wrapped another around her head like a turban, and paraded up and down like Cleopatra—much to Sybil’s amusement,” wrote Andrews’s biographer Richard Stirling.
²¹
After
Cleopatra
, when Elizabeth and Richard moved to Gstaad, their neighbors were Julie and her husband, Blake Edwards.

In 2000, as Elizabeth and Julie waited together for the Queen, Elizabeth reflected, “Julie is a lady and I’m not. I’m more of a broad, more gutsy and outgoing,” and she later recounted, “At one point while we were being ‘briefed’ on the ceremony, our patient instructor turned to Julie and advised her to ‘look after me.’ As though I would possibly misbehave!”
²²

The Comptroller of the House hold went on to explain the layout of the Palace, which has 650 rooms and is situated on forty acres in the middle of London. Not primarily a residence, it is the headquarters of the Queen as Head of State; Her Majesty’s homes are elsewhere—Windsor Castle outside London, Balmoral in Scotland, and Sandringham on Norfolk’s East Coast. The recipients were told they’d shortly traverse a couple of rooms—the Silk Tap Room and the East Gallery—to reach the nearby Ballroom, scene of the investiture. They were to queue up in an anteroom until their names were called, one at a time, over the public-address system. “When you hear it, walk forward to the center of the room, turn to face the Queen, and stop. The Queen is on the dais. You do not go on to the dais with her.”
²³
They were instructed to “move forward so you are close enough for [Her Majesty] to attach your award. She can’t reach you if you’re standing four-and-a-half feet away.” You know you’re close enough to the Queen, he explained, when your toes reach the edge of the dais. Each recipient was then issued a little tag from which the Queen would hang a medal. “While she is putting it on,” he continued, “she will be talking to you. Feel free to respond.”

The Queen prepares her remarks to each participant well in advance, having been provided notes and photographs by the Central Chancery.
²⁴
“She will then shake your hand,” the Comptroller said. “It is a firm and positive handshake. You will not miss it. It is an indication that your time is up.” The women were warned to take a
little
curtsy, that there was “no need to go right down,” the Comptroller explained. “I’ve seen them go down and not come back up again—their knees lock.” In such emergencies, Gentleman Ushers instantly appear, take hold of their elbows, and lift them up. Knights kneel, are dubbed with the Queen’s father’s sword, and receive a medal, while Dames get a neck ribbon and a brooch.