No doubt somewhat overstated, but for what it's worth...
MailOnline, 25 August 2012
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
excerpts
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’ 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.
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.’ ‘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. ‘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
‘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.
Zsuzsi 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.
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.
‘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.’