Story Maid-Up, Queen Laments

A former chambermaid at Balmoral Castle in Scotland has sold information on the British royal family to the French magazine Paris-Match. The British popular press, which was quick to pick up on the story and repeat some of the inside information, said Queen Elizabeth II is furious over the revelations by the unidentified maid, who worked at the castle last summer. In one anecdote, the maid said that the entire royal family once drank rose water from finger bowls to spare a dinner guest who thought it was soup from embarrassment, the Daily Mirror reported. The Mirror also recounted the maid’s contention that the queen so disliked Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that she banished her from Balmoral to a lonely cottage during a visit. A spokeswoman for the queen said: “The prime minister always stays at the castle.” The Mirror said the maid praised most of the royal family as “genuinely interested in our well-being,” and she described the Prince and Princess of Wales as a loving couple. “While we believe much of this woman’s account to be either exaggerated or inaccurate, it is clearly a gross breach of trust,” the Sun quoted a Buckingham Palace spokesman as saying.

--Bernhard H. Goetz has inherited $140,550 from his father’s estate, but the man known as the New York subway gunman has legal bills that will quickly eat that up, his attorney said. “That won’t go very far in defending him on anything,” said Joseph Kelner, who is representing Goetz in three civil cases asking a total of $63 million in damages. Goetz, 40, was sentenced last October to six months in jail and five years’ probation for carrying an unlicensed gun, which he used to shoot four teen-agers on a subway in December, 1984. Three of the four are suing him. Goetz is free on $5,000 bond while his case is appealed. His father, Bernhard Willard Goetz, died in 1984, and his estate was recently settled in probate court in Orlando, Fla. After payment of taxes, there was $562,200 to be split among Goetz, his brother and two sisters.

--Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, is expecting a baby, the New York Daily News reported. The paper published a photograph of an obviously pregnant Schlossberg, 30, as she arrived to give a speech in Manhattan in place of her uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who had been sidelined by a bad back. She married artist-author Edwin Schlossberg in July, 1986. The paper did not say when the baby is due. The baby would be the first grandchild for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who is 58.