28-05-2025
Iris Mountbatten broke all the rules and called herself 'the black sheep of the royal family' writes CHRISTOPHER WILSON
Once 13th in line to the throne, Iris Mountbatten broke all the rules. She called herself 'the black sheep of the Royal Family ' – and no wonder.
She married a Catholic and was booted out of the line of succession. She quit Britain for a new life in America, but got deported for bouncing a cheque.
She wheedled her way back into the States but high society turned its back and she married a jazz musician.
She became close to all the great jazz artists of the day, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie - so close, in fact, that people claimed she preferred black men in her bed.
And so, despite being born the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and growing up in Kensington Palace, Iris Mountbatten ended up scraping a living in New York and California as a film publicist, sales girl, dancer, model, and briefly TV host.
She had the looks, the personality – but she couldn't stick at anything.
'A problem child,' was how one family friend described Iris. But then Iris barely ever saw her parents – she was ushered in by her nanny at teatime to be inspected, then taken away again. So by the time she was a teenager, she'd 'gone to the dogs and [was] completely hopeless', according to the friend.
'She wanted to be royal, but at the same time mix with ordinary folk,' explained another friend. Nobody within the tight-knit royal circle could understand that.
Iris's father, known as Prince Alexander of Battenberg until the First World War forced him to ditch his German title and call himself the Marquess of Carisbrooke, was an 'irritating, nervous' man who preferred the company of men and was besotted with a promiscuous man called Simon Fleet.
Her mother, the former Irene Denison, daughter of the Earl of Londesborough, was no better – she ignored Iris, despite the girl being her only child.
However, Iris initially remained part of the tight royal circle, and at the age of 14 she was bridesmaid to Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark at her wedding to Prince George, the Duke of Kent.
Three years later, at the 1937 Coronation, she was one of six train-bearers to Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI.
She went on to be a famous and much-photographed debutante – and hoped to find in marriage the family life she'd so sadly lacked at home. In 1941, at the age of 21, she married Hamilton Keyes O'Malley, an Irish Guards officer.
It was a disastrous mistake. First, O'Malley was a Roman Catholic – which meant that, though Iris had been in line to the throne, she was removed from the order of succession under the terms of the 1772 Royal Marriages Act.
Later, she stated she did not mind this loss of prestige, adding: 'A plague would have had to hit the f***ing Palace before I'd become Queen!'
But early on in her marriage, she discovered her husband was a bully and a wife-beater. 'It was a total disaster, a nightmare,' she recalled later. 'I could never tell a divorce court all the horrible, ugly things that happened – things I still refuse to tell.'
And so, instead of Iris bringing a court action to end the marriage, her husband divorced her. It was a scandalous thing to happen to such a high-born woman, since the custom of the day in their elevated circle was that the husband would always take the blame.
That scandal – and the huge fuss created when Iris renounced her right to the throne – made her a marked woman, no longer acceptable in high society. Because of her divorce, she was banned from attending her grandmother Princess Beatrice's funeral.
She fled to the United States. Newly arrived and not understanding how US banks worked, she wrote a cheque which bounced – and was arrested. She was then ignominiously ordered to leave the country – and her title of 'royal black sheep' was born.
With no place to call home in Britain – her parents had washed their hands of her – Iris managed to get herself back into the US as a tourist. Tossing aside her privileged background she went to work, doing anything to earn a dollar.
She became an actress and model, appeared as a hostess for a live TV children's programme Versatile Varieties: Junior Edition, and also featured in TV ads endorsing Pond's Creams and Warren's Mint Cocktail Gum. For a time it looked as though she'd made a success of her escape from the royal circle.
She married a jazz guitarist, Mike Bryan, who'd played with Benny Goodman's band - but the marriage lasted just months. Drawn into this world, she came to know many of the jazz greats of the 1940s and 1950s – Duke Ellington, in his last concert appearance, dedicated one of his songs to 'Iris Mountbatten, that satin doll'.
But the quirky good looks and cheeky glamour for which she was so famed as a debutante started to fade early on, and Iris took to the bottle. 'Sex with jazz players? These are my buddies, buddies, BUDDIES,' she blurted out to one journalist. 'There are always these insinuations that I keep hopping in and out of bed with them. Why do people think, because I love them, it has to mean sex?'
'Not quite like the home life of our own dear Queen,' commented the columnist sourly.
She moved to Toronto, and started a new life with actor and announcer William Kemp – but, again, it didn't last. As a thrice-divorced royal, she waited in vain for an invitation to Charles and Diana's 1981 wedding. And when the Queen Mother paid a visit to Canada, her suggestion that they should meet was cold-shouldered by courtiers.
The black sheep had become an outcast.
Low on cash and happier in the company of those who drank a great deal, Iris Mountbatten died a sad death at the age of 62 from a brain tumour.
Her ashes were brought home to the Isle of Wight for interment in the Battenberg Chapel, in St Mildred's Church at Whippingham. The Royal Family sent no representative to visit her resting place.
