clothes. After they landed, Christopher took them straight up the Woolworth Building, at that time the tallest structure in the world, for a panoramic view of the city. Andrea bought models of it to give to his children and to the waiting reporters he enthused about New York’s skyscrapers. He also pronounced the outfits worn by American women ‘very neat indeed’. The reporters were curious about their small entourage – consisting of only a valet and a maid – and when one of them asked Andrea why he did not have a gentleman-in-waiting to attend to social matters, he laughed and replied: ‘I’m a democrat!’16
Andrea and Alice stayed in America for two months, during which time they travelled by train to Montreal to attend a memorial service for King Constantine,17 and also spent time in Washington, DC, and at Palm Beach in Florida with Christopher and Nancy – who did not let on that she was dying of cancer – before sailing back across the Atlantic on 20 March. As he prepared to board the Cunard liner Aquitania, Andrea told the press that he would not ‘risk the chance of being executed’ by going back to Greece.18 The prospect of living in Britain among a suspicious and rather hostile people did not greatly appeal either – George V would presumably have intimated to Andrea the difficulty of their staying there when he saw him in December – and so instead they decided to settle in Paris, which was already home to a cluster of Greek and Russian émigré royalty and would remain their base for the remainder of the decade.
To begin with they were lent a suite of rooms in a palais on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, but Andrea found he could not afford the household that came with it, so they soon moved across the Seine to a small lodge in the garden of 5 rue du Mont-Valérien, in the smart hilltop suburb of St Cloud, six miles west from the city centre and commanding spectacular views eastwards towards Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. Both properties belonged to Marie Bonaparte, Princess George of Greece, the wife of Andrea’s elder brother, an intriguing figure known in the family as ‘Big George’. His eventful career had included a spell in the Greek navy – during which he acquired a quarterdeck vocabulary in four languages19 – and a period as high commissioner of Crete. Earlier he had saved the life of his cousin, the future Tsar Nicholas II, by parrying the sabre of a would-be assassin in Japan.
Marie herself was a restless, exotic woman, destined shortly to become one of Sigmund Freud’s leading disciples and benefactors, and thus central to the establishment of psychoanalysis and sexology in France. She was the great-granddaughter of Napoleon’s renegade younger brother Lucien, although her great wealth came from her maternal grandfather, François Blanc, who had accumulated a vast fortune from property in Monaco and as owner of the casinos at Monte Carlo and Homburg. She had been in love with the tall and handsome Big George when they married in 1907, she aged twenty-five, he thirty-eight, but she soon became disillusioned on account of his disinterest. For one thing, he refused ever to let her kiss him on the lips and their wedding night, she recorded, culminated in ‘a short, brutal gesture’ from him and an apology: ‘I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.’20 By the time Andrea and his family came to live in the grounds of their large mansion at St Cloud, where Marie had been born, Marie and George were spending much of their time apart, she carrying on with a succession of lovers, most recently the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, he often away in Denmark with his father’s younger brother Waldemar, ten years George’s senior and the love of his life.
George had formed this unusual attachment after being entrusted to his uncle’s care at the age of fourteen, when he enrolled at the naval academy at Copenhagen. Standing on the pier where his parents’ ship was preparing to depart, he had suddenly been overwhelmed by feelings of abandonment, feelings which had then been allayed when Waldemar took his hand and walked with him back to his residence. ‘From that day,’ Big George later told Marie, ‘from that moment on, I loved him and I have never had any other friend but him.’21 On their wedding night in Athens, according to Marie, George came to her room having first visited that of his uncle, and she later wrote to her husband that ‘you needed the warmth of his voice, of his hand, and his permission to get up your courage to approach the virgin’.22 Waldemar accompanied them on the first three days of their honeymoon and George cried as they parted at Bologna. In later years, their children would become so used to seeing their father together with his uncle that they took to calling Waldemar ‘Papa Two’.
The house that Marie lent Andrea and his family was pleasantly surrounded by apple trees and gravel paths but had barely enough room for the family and their small staff. (It has since been demolished, along with Marie’s mansion, to make way for modern blocks of flats.) Philip’s sister Sophie later remembered that ‘there were always problems paying the bills’, although George and Marie’s son Peter was under the impression that his mother ‘paid all their expenses for years’.23
The extent of the family’s penury at this time is unclear. On arrival in London, Andrea told one newspaper that he had managed to bring some money with him from Greece,24 although Philip later doubted that he had ever received his army pension.25 He had a small bequest from his brother Constantine, and before that he had inherited an annuity from his father as well as Mon Repos, where the Blowers and their unfriendly dogs had stayed on as caretakers, antagonizing the local population by denying them access to the only good bathing spot near to Corfu Town.
Andrea continually worried about the threat of confiscation hanging over Mon Repos, however, and in May 1923 he wrote to his saviour Gerald Talbot refuting the notion that he was going about criticizing the revolutionary government in Greece. ‘Since I am in Paris I see nobody and I go nowhere,’ he pleaded. However, he suspected that others
wish to believe or rather make others believe the story of my dark doings abroad in order that they may lay hands on my property. I am awfully sorry to bother you with all this, but you are the only one who can help me and I hope you can see your way to letting the Foreign Office in London know that I flatly and absolutely deny the charge of carrying on any kind of propaganda. It would be idiotic of me anyhow to poke spokes in [the British counsellor] Bentinck’s wheels while he is trying his level best to save my house in Corfu!26
On the same day, he shot off another letter to Bentinck in Athens, expressing himself ‘astonished’ by the American chargé d’affaires’ suggestion that he had been spreading propaganda. ‘I cannot think where he gets his information from. I went to America to recuperate, and I can assure you that I did what I could to forget politics, revolutions and wars. When I was asked by newspaper men whether I had been imprisoned and in danger of my life, I answered in the affirmative because I could not very well tell them that I had been perfectly free … I’m afraid you will have to take my word for it.’27
In the event, Mon Repos never was confiscated, although many Greeks continued to believe that it rightfully belonged to the Greek state, as it had originally been given to ‘the King of the Hellenes’, and was not transferable.28 In 1926 Andrea leased the house to Dickie Mountbatten, providing a modest extra source of income, and in 1937, having won a legal case over its ownership, he sold it to his nephew, King George II.29
Alice, meanwhile, had inherited a tenth of her father’s estate, but this had been substantially depleted by the Bolshevik revolution and the catastrophic inflation and currency devaluation in Germany – which effectively wiped out the proceeds from the recent sale of Heiligenberg Castle, where her father had spent his youth. She also received a small allowance from her brother Georgie. However, by royal standards, the family was certainly not well off.
Andrea was never comfortable about receiving handouts, but he was at least fortunate in having several close relations with considerable sums to spare. After Christopher’s wife Nancy died in 1923, the money she left took care of the children’s school fees and other items that Andrea could not afford.30 Then there was Dickie Mountbatten’s new wife Edwina, who had inherited almost half of her grandfather Ernest Cassel’s estate, conservatively estimated at £6 million, and could thus be justly
