Edwina Mountbatten

...With the cool command and steady self-assurance of those to the manor born, the Mountbattens managed to make a bad situation even worse...

...Because of his high hopes and pinched circumstances, the marriage converted Edwina from his fiancée to his financier, as one of Dickie's most heartfelt—and transparent—expressions of early marital affection bears out...

...in no way does it diminish the political astuteness of the move...

...It's all here . . . what there is of it, that is...

...Whether or not he was right at the time, most of India's surviving Muslim minority has indeed been consigned to second-class political and economic status in an India dominated by the Congress party...

...But one must remember that her husband's dubious handiwork as a commander Juring World War II, and as imperial tribune afterwards, kept her well supplied with wounded and displaced persons...

...parties, weddings, wardrobes, and royal and society gossip predominate...

...The fact that it added to the suffering of the ruled and further stainedthe honor of the rulers is a matter of history...

...The Mountbattens' joint existence—numerous adulteries aside—was one of those calculated, professionally bound affairs one often encounters with husband-and-wife team efforts in the baser arts and crafts (London composer-lyricists, Washington politician-hostess matches, and New York tycoon-socialites and agent-author Couples-from-Hell...

...B ut never fear: readers will not be troubled unduly with discussions of such issues in Janet Morgan's new biography of Edwina Mountbatten...

...Dickie, on the other hand, always kept at least one eye on the galleries...

...Certainly no one outside her own circle of equally spoiled Jazz Age sybarites, none of whom would have been missed...

...Dickie seems to have driven with the same reckless abandon he later demonstrated when sending men into battle...

...In fairness to Edwina, she at least emerges as less of a snob and poseur than her husband...

...Appropriately, they spent part of their honeymoon in Hollywood and, not surprisingly, Edwina soon sought consolation in the arms of a succession of more ardent lovers, while continuing to bankroll Dickie's career in the Royal Navy . . . along with numerous, oft-wrecked Rolls-Royces, yachts, and other costly goodies...

...The more closely one studies this shiny, shallow couple, the less there is to make of them...

...Consider Edwina Mountbatten: had she spent the balance of her adult life as she began it—as a spoiled, self-indulgent society beauty with a few minor neuroses and a keen appetite for adultery—no one would have been the worse for it...

...If any proof were needed of Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee's political cunning, the choice of this fashionable aristocratic couple to cover Britain's headlong retreat from Empire provides it...

...She really should have stayed in bed . . . where she was so much more at home...

...For the sort of person interested in learning that the young Dickie Mountbatten nicknamed his future wife's breasts "Mutt and Jeff"—not, one hopes, due to disparate dimensions—Miss Morgan's lengthy but rather trivial book should prove rewarding reading...

...the Mountbattens' peacetime motoring is a gory chronicle of overturned pig carts and squashed dogs on the Continent, and bus collisions in Knightsbridge back in London...

...The idle rich are bad enough, but they pale by comparison to the hyperactive rich...

...Still, there is the occasional revelation...

...Within twenty-four hours of her death, however, he gloated in his diary over the "fantastic BBC, TV and newspaper coverage," and hundreds of "telegrams and letters from Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers, Ambassadors, Commanders-in-Chief and organizations...

...True, in her attempts to raise her own civic consciousness, Edwina Mountbatten did perform a few genuinely good works, especially in volunteer nursing and refugee assistance...

...At times, statesmanship spills over into soap opera...

...Dickie was the scion of a European princely house with long bloodlines and short pockets...

...Thus, when Edwina died suddenly, of heart failure, in 1960, he was genuinely grief-stricken...

...Whether it was carnal or merely gooey, this affair hopelessly prejudiced the atmosphere of the talks that led up to partition...

...Instead, driven perhaps by the boredom inherent in marriage to one of the most self-absorbed, oblivious stuffed-shirts of the century, Edwina reached out and tried to live a meaningful life...

...Edwina's enthusiasm for Nehru and her sway over her husband further convinced Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the prickly leader of the Muslim League, that justice was not to be had and that a separate homeland, Pakistan, was the only answer for Indian Muslims...

...One suspects that Edwina felt much the same way...

...Marriage to such a man precluded a full "life of her own," but his very superficiality left her enough space on the margin to prove herself a deeper, potentially more interesting person than her exploded (in the end, quite literally, thanks to IRA terrorists) myth of a husband...

...Even aside from their insufferable obtrusiveness, the hyperactive rich do a hell of a lot more harm than their quiescent cousins...

...whenever she did something shocking or slightly louche in later life, "people would observe that she was, after all, only partly English...

...Edwina had beauty and money, but was the granddaughter of a German-born millionaire of Jewish ancestry, Sir Ernest Cassel...

...But they did so with such aplomb that they exited, albeit over a carpet of corpses, to nearly universal applause...

...Edwina's headlong infatuation with Jawaharlal Nehru was the talk of British India while it was going on and has since been substantiated by published diaries, correspondence, and the recollections of eyewitnesses...

...Affairs of the boudoir take precedence over affairs of state...

...Presidents, writes frequently on British history and biography in History Today and other publications...

...Whatever Edwina's good works, they were more than overbalanced by her own and her husband's incredibly smug, bungled performance as the last Viceroy and Vicereine of British India...

...When, in later life, she took on real humanitarian and charitable responsibilities, for example, she never sought publicity, and devoted her considerable energies and not inconsiderable pushiness to achieving results...

...His close ancestral and personal ties to the House of Windsor guaranteed him a leg up at court and in military circles, once he could meet expenses...

...The party, in turn, remains the virtual monopoly of upper-caste Hindus who, even when not religious, often harbor lingering resentment against a Muslim minority that conquered India under the Moghuls and played a role disproportionate to its numbers in the British Indian Army...

...The Mountbatten marriage was a concoction of convenience, based on a joint thirst for fame and symbiotic rather than shared skills...

...Despite the subtitle "A Life of Her Own," Edwina Mountbatten's life was led very much in tandem The American Spectator March 1992 59 with her husband's...

...Without Edwina's help, he gratefully acknowledged, he "would have no polo, ponies...

...Vice Admiral Manley Power, one of Mountbatten's last commanding officers, later reminisced that "I found him an endless source of entertainment with his peacock mountebankery which kept popping up at unexpected moments in sharp contrast to his normal sane and statesmanlike person...

...Aram Bakshian, Jr., an aide to three U.S...