The Secret Life Of Olga Alexandrova Romanova Was Much Nastier Than You Thought

In June 1959, a seventy-seven-year-old woman left a two-room apartment above a Cooksville beauty salon to lunch with Queen Elizabeth II aboard the royal yacht Britannia. That evening she went home. She sold watercolors for grocery money. The story people repeated was simple: Olga Alexandrovna gave up a palace for love. What they did not repeat was the fifteen-year marriage she said was never consummated, or the lover installed in her husband's house as his paid aide. Three names, one St. Petersburg address. And the man who kept her there was her brother, the Tsar. It had begun in 1901.