CRAIG BROWN: Bedazzled by love at first slight!
Tatler magazine reports that, back in 1960, Toni Gardiner, the 19-year-old daughter of a British Army officer from Suffolk, was working as a secretarial assistant on the film-set of Lawrence Of Arabia.
One day, she met the 27-year-old King Hussein of Jordan. He was dressed up as a pirate for a fancy dress party. She told him that the costume made him look scruffy.
The King was taken aback. ‘For the first time in my life, here was a girl who took an interest in me as a human being,’ he recalled.
They married the following year.
Here are four further stories of romance and marriage. Together, they suggest that an abrasive approach can yield dividends.
Toni Gardiner (pictured with the Crown Prince Abdullah) met the 27-year-old King Hussein of Jordan while he was dressed up as a pirate for a fancy dress party
1 It was on the weekend of January 10, 1931 that Wallis Simpson first met the Prince of Wales. Wallis and her husband were staying with Lady Furness at Burrough Court, a grand house in Leicestershire. The 37-year-old bachelor Prince was a fellow guest.
As the Prince remembered it, at dinner on the first night, he turned to Wallis and asked if, as an American living in England, she missed central heating.
‘I am sorry, sir,’ she replied, ‘but you have disappointed me.’
‘In what way?’
‘Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’
No one had ever spoken to the Prince of Wales like that before. A romance blossomed. Five years later, the Prince — by now King Edward VIII — abdicated his throne in order to marry Mrs Simpson.
2 Yoko Ono has always claimed that, the first time she met John Lennon, she hardly knew who The Beatles were. Apparently, the only Beatle she could name was Ringo Starr, because Ringo means ‘apple’ in Japanese.
Ono was hosting an exhibition, ‘Unfinished Paintings And Objects by Yoko Ono’, at the Indica Art Gallery in London. Lennon, a friend of the gallery owner, came to look round it.
This is how John remembered their first conversation: ‘I see this thing called Hammer A Nail. It’s a board with a chain and a hammer hanging on it, and a bunch of nails at the bottom, and I said, “Can I hammer a nail into it?” She said, “No”, and walked away.’
oko Ono has always claimed that, the first time she met John Lennon, she hardly knew who The Beatles were
For years, no one had ever spoken like that to a Beatle. Lennon divorced his wife Cynthia in November 1968, and married Yoko Ono (pictured with him) in 1969.
3 Meghan Markle met Prince Harry at Soho House in 2016. She claims she had only the most cursory knowledge of who he was.
‘Because I’m from the States you don’t grow up with the same understanding of the Royal Family,’ she explained to the BBC on their engagement in 2017.
‘And so while I now understand very clearly there’s a global interest there, I didn’t know much about him.’
In the same interview, she said of the mutual friend who had set up their blind date: ‘The only thing I had asked her when she said she wanted to set us up was — I had one question, I said, “Well, is he nice?” Because if he wasn’t kind … it didn’t seem like it would make sense.’
And later: ‘Anything I learnt about him and his family was what he would share with me and vice versa. So for both of us it was just a really authentic and organic way to get to know each other.’
Harry seems to have been drawn to her at least partly because she showed so little interest in his family. He confirms this in his autobiography. According to Harry, after he introduced Meghan to the Queen, Meghan ‘asked me something about the Queen’s assistant . . . that man who walked her to the door’.
‘That wasn’t her assistant . . . that was her second son, Andrew,’ says Harry. He adds, approvingly: ‘She definitely hadn’t Googled us.’
Meghan Markle met Prince Harry at Soho House in 2016 and claims she had only the most cursory knowledge of who he was
4 Paul McCartney met Heather Mills in 1999. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Mills claimed to know nothing about The Beatles, though she said: ‘I liked Wings.’
‘Many theories would later be advanced about how someone normally so shrewd and cautious could have fallen so quickly and heavily,’ writes Philip Norman in his biography of Paul.
‘Not to be discounted was the relief of being with someone totally unawed by his Beatle fame.’
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