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It was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings ... a trip to the moon on gossamer wings ... just one of those things.'
The voice belting out Cole Porter's fatalistic lyric of lost love on a newly released double CD is that of a woman of the world - sensual, sophisticated, flirtatious.
It belongs to a celebrated star of whom the actress Patricia Hodge once wrote: 'She dominated the West End like a Colossus. Her presence in any restaurant would create a hush; in any nightclub would guarantee an entrance round of applause. Her every professional and social activity was newspaper worthy. She was a legend . . .'
Actress Pat Kirkwood always denied having an affair with Prince Philip
But legend or not, Pat Kirkwood lived for six decades under the cloud of suspicion that she had been the mistress of Prince Philip.
The more she denied the rumour, the more it was believed. Philip himself, adhering to the Royal Family's tradition of declining to comment on matters relating to their private lives, failed to come to her defence. He said nothing, one way or the other, despite her repeatedly imploring him to set the record straight.
And when she died almost exactly a year ago, after 60 distinguished years of stardom, during which she helped to rally the nation's morale in World War II, her life ended devoid of official recognition and without so much as a humble MBE.
Throughout the songs on this week's new CD, there are echoes of the royal saga that was to haunt her to her dying day.
Included is the song she sang on that fateful night in October 1948, when Pat, then the West End's biggest and highest-paid star, came face to face with the 27-year-old Prince Philip for the first time.
Wearing a near-transparent black lace dress slit at the side to reveal the fabulous legs that the critic Kenneth Tynan later hymned as 'the eighth wonder of the world', Kirkwood sang: 'Hold it Joe, hold it Joe, I'm not that kind of girl you know . . .'
Backstage, in the star dressing room after the curtain had fallen, Kirkwood, waited impatiently for her then boyfriend, the society photographer Baron, to arrive to take her out for dinner.
Dressed to the nines in a fabulous new long pale coral evening dress, with one black velvet rose on the hip, and a white ermine jacket, Kirkwood was less than pleased when Baron phoned her from Wheeler's Restaurant in Soho, where he had spent the day at a more than usually bibulous meeting of the all-male Thursday Club, which held weekly luncheons.
'There will be three of us,' he announced in a sepulchral whisper, and then hung up.
When, to general consternation, Prince Philip's head came round the dressing room door, Kirkwood's mother, Norah, had just emerged, 'to the accompaniment of Niagara Falls', from the bathroom, which had 'the loudest flush in London'.
As HRH entered, Pat's dresser, Bessie Porter, a large woman built like a bus, attempted to sink into a curtsy, but got stuck three-quarters of the way down. Philip was among those who had to haul her to her feet.
Within 24 hours of Pat meeting Prince Philip, rumours spread around the world
The royal party left the theatre, with Prince Philip driving Kirkwood in his sports car. According to the later account of Kirkwood's third husband, actor, composer and playwright Hubert Gregg, copious quantities of alcohol had been consumed at the Thursday Club.
'Not to put too fine a point on it, they'd all had a skinful,' said Gregg. 'Pat was not a driver, but she may well have saved Prince Philip from a drink-driving charge.
'On their way up Piccadilly, he was running into the bumpers of cars in front of them, and she several times grabbed the wheel in order to prevent an accident.'
Their arrival at Mayfair's most exclusive restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs, caused a sensation.
At the sight of the tall, flaxen-haired royal consort, escorting the most beautiful young star of the day to their table, a hush descended on the celebrity-packed nightspot.
As Philip ordered beer and Kirkwood ordered champagne, hardly a knife or fork moved at any of the adjoining tables.
'You could have heard a pin drop,' she told me many years later.
Next, the royal party went on to the Milroy nightclub upstairs, where Kirkwood and Philip danced until 4.30am. The encounter ended with the dancing partners consuming scrambled eggs at dawn in Baron's flat.
Unknown to Kirkwood, even before they had left the nightclub, the rumour mills had started to grind. Within 24 hours, the saga was in print around the world.
George VI, incandescent with rage on behalf of his daughter, the future Queen, who was then eight months pregnant with her first child, Charles, lambasted his son-in-law in largely unprintable language.
Baron also fell from royal favour as a result of this episode. When Prince Philip attempted to recommend him to take the official pictures of the Queen's Coronation in 1953, he was sternly opposed by his formidable mother-in-law, the Queen Mother, who insisted successfully that Cecil Beaton should be chosen.
Most royal rumours swiftly fade. This one did not. With the years, it grew in substance.
Kirkwood was horrified to hear herself being openly described as Philip's mistress, and influential members of White's (the leading Establishment club in St James's) began to state authoritatively that the royal consort had given the musical star a white Rolls-Royce.
The truth, however, was that Kirkwood had never possessed a Rolls-Royce and was simply given a miniature one by her second husband, shipowner Spiro de Spero Gabriele. It stood on her mantelpiece for years.
Possibly in an attempt to squash the rumours, Prince Philip took the Queen to watch Kirkwood displaying her celebrated legs as Principal Boy in a West End pantomime, and the star was chosen to appear in four Royal Variety Performances, after each of which she was publicly presented to the Queen and her husband.
At one of these, Philip told Kirkwood, in the hearing of the comedian Terry-Thomas, how much he had loved 'that evening at Les A. Oh, I did enjoy it'.
Yet despite Kirkwood's glittering career achievements, the awards she won, including being voted Television Personality of the Year, successive Honours lists came and went without any mention of her name. The royal rumour, it seemed, was considered by the faceless gnomes of Whitehall as a strike against her.
The saga of 'the Prince and the Showgirl', which became a favourite tabloid headline - it infuriated Kirkwood, who had been a solo performer from the age of 14 and had never danced in a chorus in her life - inaugurated six decades of rumour that the Duke of Edinburgh was an unfaithful husband and a boorish philanderer.
Not only Kirkwood was linked with him romantically, but also his childhood friend, the Greek cabaret star Helene Cordet, who had two children by her future second husband while separated from her first husband, but declined at the time to name the father.
When Philip elected to become godfather to both children, it was instantly assumed that he must be their father.
Many years later, Cordet's son, Max, who became a professor of economics, was finally provoked into issuing a public statement denying this utterly.
After Kirkwood and Cordet, numerous other famous and beautiful women have been alleged to have been Philip's lovers.
To squash the rumours, Prince Philip took the Queen to watch Pat in a West End pantomime
They include the Countess of Westmorland, wife of the Queen's Master of the Horse, the novelist Daphne du Maurier, wife of the Comptroller of the Royal Household, the actresses Merle Oberon and Anna Massey, the TV personality Katie Boyle, the Duchess of York's mother, Susan Barrantes, the Duchess of Abercorn, wife of the Lord Steward of the Royal Household, the Queen's first cousin, Princess Alexandra, and Philip's glamorous carriage-driving companion, Lady Romsey.
Of these, Daphne du Maurier was merely a casual acquaintance. Katie Boyle has rubbished suggestions of intimacy. Anna Massey met Philip only once socially. And the Duchess of Abercorn, while admitting to 'a highly charged chemistry' with Philip, denied any physical relationship, adding that 'the passion was in the ideas'.
To a female journalist who once had the temerity to question him about the rumours of extra-marital infidelities, Philip barked: 'Good God, woman, I don't know what sort of company you keep.
'Have you ever stopped to think that for the past 40 years I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me? So how the hell could I get away with anything like that?'
Sometimes, however, Philip's somewhat chauvinist sense of humour has served to add fuel to the fires of speculation.
'How could I be unfaithful to the Queen?' he once inquired rhetorically. 'There is no way that she could possibly retaliate.'
And to a hapless woman solicitor in a royal reception line, he observed loudly: 'I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit.'
But as the first anniversary of Pat Kirkwood's death draws near, I can reveal that the star, whose beauty and charisma launched all these rumours 60 years ago, has come to Prince Philip's rescue posthumously in the way that he failed to do for her during her lifetime.
Her fourth and last husband, the distinguished former solicitor, Peter Knight, ex-President of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, tells me: 'I have in my possession correspondence-which passed between my wife and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh which leaves no room for doubt that the allegations so often made regarding a relation- ship between them are entirely without foundation.
'It was my wife's express wish that these letters should be handed in the fullness of time to the Duke's official biographer in order that the truth may be finally established. Until that time, they will not be released for publication.'
Peter Knight is precluded by Kirkwood's own instructions from showing these letters to anyone in Philip's lifetime. But during my own close friendship with the star, she herself showed them to me.
On October 2, 1988, writing from Balmoral Castle, with the Order of the Garter motto beneath the royal crown - Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense (Evil Be to Him Who Evil Thinks) - Philip lamented the latest media resurrection of their supposed affair.
'I am very sorry indeed to hear that you have been pestered about that ridiculous "rumour". The trouble is that certain things seem to get into journalist "folklore" and it is virtually impossible to get it out of the system.
'Much as I would like to put a stop to this, and many other similar stories about other members of the family, we have found that, short of starting libel proceedings, there is absolutely nothing to be done.
'Invasion of privacy, invention and false quotations are the bane of our existence . . .'
Later, learning that Kirkwood was writing her memoirs,
Philip urged her: 'I feel that your best bet is to put the facts squarely in your book. It may not make any difference to what the "evil-minded" may think, but I am sure that most reasonable people would accept what you say, and it would then be on the record. Philip.'
From Sandringham on January 12, 1989, the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to deplore the news that Kirkwood and her husband had been besieged by Sunday tabloid reporters and photographers.
'I am deeply sorry that you have had this very unpleasant experience with the Press.
After nearly 40 years of such treatment, I am more or less hardened to this sort of thing, so please do not feel any anxiety about my reaction - I can only hope that the matter will now be dropped. There must be a limit to the amount of blood you can squeeze out of a stone. Philip.'
But the matter was not dropped. On May 6, 1993, Kirkwood wrote bitterly to Buckingham Palace: 'I think if there had been some support from your direction, the matter could have been squashed years ago instead of having to battle a sea of sharks single-handed.'
But Philip, true to royal tradition, remained steadfastly silent. And Pat Kirkwood's name remained conspicuous by its absence from the Honours list.
On the new CD, she sings: 'If we'd thought a bit of the end of it when we started painting the town, we'd have been aware that our love affair was too hot not to cool down . . .'
As we now know, it wasn't a love affair, although millions wanted to believe that it was, just as they still like to think of Philip as the royal
Jack the Lad who cheats on his long-suffering wife.
The final extraordinary irony is that now, a year after her death, Pat Kirkwood has rescued the reputation of the man whose association with her did her such grievous damage.
She has also gone a long way towards proving that the Duke of Edinburgh's 61-year marriage to the Queen - the woman he still fondly calls 'Cabbage' - has been a happy one, unblemished by the infidelities constructed in the minds of royal fantasists.
• The double CD, The Unforgettable Pat Kirkwood (Avid Easy AMSC 966), costs £7.99, including postage, from 01923 281281 or ww.avidgroup.co.uk
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