\n<\/p>\n
It’s easy to imagine cutlery clinking, chandeliers sparkling and two icons staring at each other. On June 5, 1961, John F. Kennedy<\/a> and Jackie Kennedy<\/a> dined with Queen Elizabeth II<\/a> and the Duke of Edinburgh<\/a> at Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t a state banquet, but instead a highly formal dinner in the midst of a European tour. All accounts agree on one thing: the evening was anything but carefree, with extraneous guests shunned and personal sensitivities ruffled. In his book Q: A Voyage Around the Queen<\/em><\/a>, British journalist Craig Brown<\/strong> meticulously recounted the waltz of the evening that Camelot came to Buckingham.<\/p>\n According to Brown, Jackie Kennedy had requested the presence of her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her brother-in-law, Polish Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, at the dinner. Initially considered undesirable because the former had already been divorced once and the latter twice, Elizabeth II finally relented and extended the invitations after \u201cmuch hesitation.\u201d However, the sovereign’s strong position enabled her to exact revenge in her own way. According to writer Gore Vidal, a close friend of Jackie Kennedy, the monarch deliberately withheld invitations from Princess Margaret and Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, whom the American first lady had expressly asked to meet. The result, Brown wrote, was an evening of \u201cdreary platitude\u201d that left the first lady unimpressed. \u201cNo Margaret, no Marina, no one but every Commonwealth agriculture minister they could find,\u201d she was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n Yet it was in the midst of this staid ceremony that a moment of connivance between the two women is said to have arisen. The Queen is said to have asked Jackie Kennedy about her recent tour of Canada, leading the first lady to confide how \u201cexhausting\u201d it was to perform for hours on end, and Elizabeth II, \u201clooking conspiratorial,\u201d according to Brown, replied: \u201cWith time, you become astute, you learn to take it easy.\u201d The line alone sums up a royal philosophy of public survival: Allowing yourself a side exit, a detour, an airlock\u2014in short, keeping your breath to last. According to Vidal, Jackie found the exchange with the sovereign \u201crather laborious.\u201d When Vidal later reported the phrase to Princess Margaret, she reportedly retorted, with acid phlegm: \u201cBut that’s why she’s here.\u201d<\/p>\n