From the New York
Times bestselling author of Elizabeth the Queen comes the first major
biography of Prince Charles in more than twenty years—perfect for
fans of The Crown.
Sally Bedell Smith
returns once again to the British royal family to give us a new look
at Prince Charles, the oldest heir to the throne in more than three
hundred years. This vivid, eye-opening biography—the product of
four years of research and hundreds of interviews with palace
officials, former girlfriends, spiritual gurus, and more, some
speaking on the record for the first time—is the first
authoritative treatment of Charles’s life that sheds light on the
death of Diana, his marriage to Camilla, and his preparations to take
the throne one day.
Prince Charles
brings to life the real man, with all of his ambitions, insecurities,
and convictions. It begins with his lonely childhood, in which he
struggled to live up to his father’s expectations and sought
companionship from the Queen Mother and his great-uncle Lord
Mountbatten. It follows him through difficult years at school, his
early love affairs, his intellectual quests, his entrepreneurial
pursuits, and his intense search for spiritual meaning. It tells of
the tragedy of his marriage to Diana; his eventual reunion with his
true love, Camilla; and his relationships with William, Kate, Harry,
and his grandchildren.
Ranging from his
glamorous palaces to his country homes, from his globe-trotting
travels to his local initiatives, Smith shows how Prince Charles
possesses a fiercely independent spirit and yet has spent more than
six decades waiting for his destined role, living a life dictated by
protocols he often struggles to obey. With keen insight and the
discovery of unexpected new details, Smith lays bare the
contradictions of a man who is more complicated, tragic, and
compelling than we knew, until now.
Advance praise for
Prince Charles
“Comprehensive and
admirably fair . . . Until his accession to the throne, Smith’s
portrait will stand as the definitive study.”—Booklist, starred
review
“Astute . . . a
sympathetic psychological study . . . [Smith’s] portrait is
enormously touching and supported by wide-ranging interviews and
research. . . . A thorough, timely biography.”—Kirkus
“Prince Charles is
an eighteenth-century gentleman with a twenty-first-century mission.
His love of tradition combines with an outlook that can be bracingly
avant garde. Sally Bedell Smith captures his contradictions and his
convictions in this fascinating book that is not just about a man who
would be king, but also about the duties that come with
privilege.”—Walter Isaacson
“For all we know
about Prince Charles, there is so much we didn’t know—until now.
Sally Bedell Smith has given us a complete and compelling portrait of
the man in the shadow of the throne. It’s all here, from the back
stairs of the palaces to the front pages of the tabs. Read all about
it!”—Tom Brokaw
Prince
Charles is sad and sexy and maybe too nice to be king
"Prince
Charles" by Sally Bedell Smith.
By THE WASHINGTON
POST
By Roxanne Roberts,
The Washington Post
April 6, 2017 at
4:14 pm
“Poor Charles.”
That’s what Sally
Bedell Smith kept hearing from everyone as she worked on her new book
about the British monarch-in-waiting. Charles Philip Arthur George
has been heir to the British throne for 65 years: His mother became
queen when he was 3 years old, and she is still going strong at 90.
He has spent his entire life waiting for his one and only job.
Overshadowed in turn
by his mother, his first wife, and now his two sons, he’s best
known as the prince who married Diana and was a terrible husband.
When she died in 1997, the narrative was all but set in stone:
Charles was dull, stoic and not very sympathetic.
“The vision we all
have of him is of this extremely buttoned-up stereotype –
double-breasted suit encasing him – a stiff, an old fogey, the guy
who ruined Diana’s life,” says Bedell Smith, who first met the
prince 26 years ago. “I was so struck by how different he was:
funny, informal, warm, with this incredibly sexy voice.”
"Prince
Charles" by Sally Bedell Smith.Max Hirshfeld“Prince Charles”
by Sally Bedell Smith.
Four years ago, the
Washington-based author of biographies about Diana and the queen
decided to tackle the man who would be king. Her 500-page book,
“Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life,”
is not an authorized biography, but the palace assisted with access
to public appearances, interviews and research.
It shows Charles as
a royal son, a father, an activist and an eccentric. He owns shoes
made from 18th-century reindeer skins. He is both very old-fashioned
(he doesn’t use computers) and very modern (he is a lifelong
proponent of conservation and sustainability). He is rich, but not
above courting Americans to support his charities, including several
wealthy patrons here in Washington, D.C.
At its heart, the
book is the story of a sensitive, lonely kid and his quest to find
purpose in his life. Temperamentally the opposite of his mother –
she’s straightforward and unflappable – Charles has always been
too emotional and too insecure for a life that demands a thick skin
and personal sacrifice.
But what choice does
he have? There is a sign in his dressing room at his country home,
Highgrove: “Be patient and endure.”
In the 1970s,
Charles was the most eligible bachelor in the world. The tabloids
breathlessly reported every date and scrutinized every girlfriend as
a future queen. President Richard M. Nixon tried matchmaking for his
daughter, Tricia, and seated Charles next to her at every event
during the prince’s 1970 visit to Washington. (Charles was
unimpressed, describing her as “artificial and plastic.”)
Everyone knows the
story of his world-famous, ill-fated first marriage to Lady Diana
Spencer. Bedell Smith explains why he proposed to a 20-year-old whom
he barely knew. He had followed the advice of his confidant and
mentor, Earl Louis Mountbatten, and had enjoyed affairs with women
who were not, by the standards of the day, fit to be a princess. But
Charles planned to marry by his 30th birthday, and he felt anxious
and pressured when that date passed with no bride. When Diana set her
sights on him, he married her in 1981 although he was not in love
with her.
He was, however,
crazy about Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he had met in 1972. She was
irreverent, sexy, unintimidated and an ideal complement to the
serious heir to the throne. The two had a six-month affair, but
Camilla was besotted with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Andrew
Parker Bowles. She married the unfaithful charmer while Charles was
away on naval duties, which stunned the prince. But the two remained
friends and resumed their relationship in earnest about five years
into his very unhappy marriage.
That love triangle
ended in a messy and humiliating divorce, which painted a public
portrait of Diana as the victim of an unfeeling royal family and of
Charles as an insensitive jerk. The palace was in the middle of a
cautious public relations rollout to introduce Charles and Camilla as
a couple when Diana was killed in 1997. It took another eight years
before they finally felt that it was possible to marry without
endangering his claim to the throne.
In the meantime, he
busied himself with dozens of causes, which he takes very seriously.
“He has really labored to be admired and accepted for the things he
has done rather than what he was born to be,” Bedell Smith says.
As Prince of Wales,
Charles inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, which generates upward of
$25 million a year in income for him, which pays for his household
and staff and supports William and Kate and Harry. Despite his
wealth, he’s never had qualms about raising millions from American
patrons for his charities. “Charles’s cunning in extracting money
from eager benefactors was perilously intertwined with a weakness for
the company and perks of the superrich,” Bedell Smith writes.
In 1997, Charles
hired Robert Higdon, a Washingtonian who had worked for Ronald and
Nancy Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, as executive director of the
Prince of Wales Foundation. Higdon revamped it, expanded its
charitable mission and persuaded couples to donate $20,000 each to
hobnob with Charles at Highgrove and other royal palaces. The visits
also became a vehicle for Camilla to launch an international charm
offensive.
That effort was so
successful that in 2008, Joe L. Allbritton sank $2.5 million into the
development of Duchy USA, a line of products from the prince’s
properties. After almost a year of planning, the project was abruptly
canceled when the palace sold the worldwide rights to a British
supermarket chain.
But all was forgiven
– Allbritton and his wife, Barby, were invited to William and
Kate’s wedding in 2011, and Allbritton loaned Charles his private
jet for a quick trip to Washington.
The queen turns 91
this month and is still deeply involved with her royal duties. She
has gin with Dubonnet at lunch and a martini before dinner. Charles,
now 68, holds the record as the longest heir-in-waiting and could
easily go another decade before becoming king. (His maternal
grandmother lived to 101.)
“The life that
he’s led and the troubles and torments that he has had have, in a
way, made it possible for William and Harry to lead much more normal
lives,” Bedell Smith says. One royal adviser told her, “These are
two guys on a raft who escaped from the shipwreck of their family and
made it to the other shore.”
Talk of skipping
Charles and giving the crown to William has subsided, which gives the
young prince more time to enjoy a traditional (by royal standards)
family life. Harry, who is fifth in line to the throne, probably has
the best of both worlds – an incredibly tight relationship with his
brother and enough fame and money to do pretty much anything he
wants.
And Camilla? Time
heals, or at least forgives. The woman once dubbed “the Rottweiler”
has achieved grudging public acceptance. She has the full support of
the Queen (grateful that her oldest son is finally happy) and an easy
camaraderie with William, Kate and Harry.
When the couple
married in 2005, the palace tried to mollify Diana loyalists by
saying that Camilla would be called “princess consort” when
Charles becomes king. Now, it looks as if she may become queen after
all. When asked about this during a 2010 interview with NBC, Charles
stammered: “That’s, well … we’ll see, won’t we? That could
be.”
But that, like
everything else for Charles, is somewhere in the future.
BOOKS APRIL 10,
2017 ISSUE
 |
Charles has become unpopular trying to carve out a role while waiting longer to reign than any previous Prince of Wales.
Illustration by Floc’h
|
WHERE
PRINCE CHARLES WENT WRONG
The Prince of Wales
makes himself most unpopular when he tries hardest to be a worthy
heir to the throne.
By Zoë Heller
For at least a
decade, senior aides at Buckingham Palace have been quietly finessing
arrangements for the moment when the Queen dies and her son Prince
Charles becomes sovereign. One of their chief concerns, apparently,
is that republicans may try to use the interval between the death of
the old monarch and the coronation of the new one to whip up
anti-royal sentiment. In order to minimize the potential for such
rabble-rousing, they propose to speed things up as much as decorum
will allow: in contrast to the stately sixteen-month pause that
elapsed between the death of King George VI, in February, 1952, and
the anointing of the Queen, in June, 1953, King Charles III will be
whisked to Westminster Abbey no later than three months after his
mother’s demise.
The threat of a
Jacobin-style insurgency in modern Britain would seem, on the face of
it, rather remote. Despite successive royal scandals and crises,
support for the monarchy has remained robust. In the wake of Princess
Diana’s death in 1997, when the reputation of the Windsors was said
to have reached its nadir, the Scottish writer Tom Nairn sensed that
the crowds of mourners lining the Mall had “gathered to witness
auguries of a coming time” when Britain would at last be freed from
“the mouldering waxworks” ensconced in Buckingham Palace. But,
almost twenty years later, roughly three-quarters of Britons believe
that the country would be “worse off without” the Royal Family,
and Queen Elizabeth II, who recently beat out Queen Victoria to
become the longest-reigning monarch in British history, continues to
command something approaching feudal deference. Last year, to honor
her ninetieth birthday, legions of British townspeople and villagers
turned out to paint walls and pick up litter, in a national effort
known as “Clean for the Queen.”
There is some reason
to doubt, however, whether such loyalty will persist once the Queen’s
son, now sixty-eight years old, ascends the throne. His Royal
Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, K.G.,
K.T., G.C.B., O.M., A.K., Q.S.O., P.C., A.D.C., Earl of Chester, Duke
of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew,
Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, is a
deeply unpopular man. Writers in both the conservative and the
liberal press regularly refer to him as “a prat,” “a twit,”
and “an idiot,” with no apparent fear of giving offense to their
readership. In a 2016 poll, only a quarter of respondents said that
they would like Charles to succeed the Queen, while more than half
said they would prefer to see his son Prince William crowned instead.
Even among those who profess to think him a decent chap, there is a
widespread conviction that he does the monarchy more harm than good.
“Our Prince of Wales is a fundamentally decent and serious man,”
one conservative columnist recently wrote. “He possesses a strong
sense of duty. Might not it be best expressed by renouncing the
throne in advance?”
How this
enthusiastic and diligent person, who has frequently stated his
desire to be a good, responsible monarch, managed to incur such
opprobrium is the central question that the American writer Sally
Bedell Smith sets out to answer in a new biography, “Prince
Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life” (Random
House). Hers is not an entirely disinterested investigation. As might
be inferred from her two previous alliteratively subtitled
works—“Diana in Search of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled
Princess” and “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern
Monarch”—Smith is an avid monarchist. For anyone invested in the
survival of the royals, Prince Charles presents a challenge, and
Smith’s stance is very close to what one imagines a senior palace
aide’s might be: Charles is far from ideal, but he is what we’ve
got, and there can be no talk of mucking about with the law of
succession and replacing him with his son. Once you start allowing
the popular will to determine who wears the crown, people are liable
to wonder why anyone is wearing a crown in the first place.
Smith’s mission
is, therefore, to reconcile us to the inevitability of King Charles
III and to convince us that his reign may not be as insufferable as
is generally feared. Having had the honor of meeting the Prince
“socially” on more than one occasion, she can attest that he is
“far warmer” than the tabloids would have you think. She can also
vouch for his “emotional intelligence,” “capacious mind,”
“elephantine memory,” “preternatural aesthetic sense,”
“talent as a consummate diplomat,” and “independent spirit.”
Early on, however,
it becomes apparent that Smith’s public-relations instincts are at
war with a fundamental dislike of her subject. The grade-inflating
summaries she offers at the beginning and the end of the book are
overpowered by the damning portrait that emerges in between. The man
we encounter here is a ninny, a whinger, a tantrum-throwing
dilettante, “hopelessly thin-skinned . . . naïve and resentful.”
He is a preening snob, “keenly sensitive to violations of
protocol,” intolerant of “opinions contrary to his own,” and
horribly misled about the extent of his own talents. (An amateur
watercolorist, he once offered Lucian Freud one of his paintings in
exchange for one of Freud’s; the artist unaccountably demurred.) He
is a “prolix, circular” thinker, “more of an intellectual
striver than a genuine intellectual,” who extolls Indian slums for
their sustainable way of life and preaches against the corrupting
allure of “sophistication” while himself living in unfathomable
luxe. (He reportedly travels with a white leather toilet seat, and
Smith details his outrage on the rare occasions when he has to fly
first class rather than in a private jet.) Although the book would
like to be a nuanced adjudication of the Prince’s “paradoxes,”
it ends up becoming a chronicle of peevishness and petulance.
Prince Charles was
three years old when he became heir apparent. Asked years later when
it was that he had first realized he would one day be king, he said
that there had been no particular moment of revelation, just a slow,
“ghastly, inexorable” dawning. Doubts about his fitness for his
future role were raised from the start. As a timorous, sickly child,
prone to sinus infections and tears, he was a source of puzzlement
and some disappointment to his parents. His mother, whom he would
later describe as “not indifferent so much as detached,” worried
that he was a “slow developer.” His father, Prince Philip,
thought him weedy, effete, and spoiled. Too physically uncoördinated
to be any good at team sports, too scared of horses to enjoy riding
lessons, and too sensitive not to despair when, at the age of eight,
he was sent away to boarding school, he was happiest spending time
with his grandmother the Queen Mother, who gave him hugs, took him to
the ballet, and, as he later put it, “taught me how to look at
things.” Neither physical demonstrativeness nor sensitivity to art
was considered a desirable trait by the rest of his family. Charles
told an earlier biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, about a time when he
ventured to express enthusiasm about the Leonardo da Vinci drawings
in the Royal Library at Windsor; his parents and siblings gazed at
him with an embarrassed bemusement that, he said, made him feel
“squashed and guilty,” as if he had “in some indefinable way
let his family down.” (Charles has continued to define himself
against his family’s philistinism, boasting in his letters and
journals of his intense, lachrymose responses to art, literature, and
nature.)
In an effort to
build the character of his soppy, aesthete son, Prince Philip sent
him to his own alma mater, Gordonstoun, a famously spartan boarding
school in Scotland founded on the promise of emancipating “the sons
of the powerful” from “the prison of privilege.” Charles—the
jug-eared, non-sportif future king—was a prime target for bullying,
and when he wasn’t being beaten up he was more or less ostracized.
(Boys made “slurping” noises at anyone who tried to be nice to
him.) That he survived this misery was largely due to the various
dispensations he was afforded as a V.I.P. pupil. He was allowed to
spend weekends at the nearby home of family friends (where he could
“cry his eyes out” away from the jeers of other boys) and, in his
final year, was made head boy and given his own room in the apartment
of his art master. He had taken up the cello by this point, and,
although he was, by his own admission, “hopeless,” the art master
arranged for him to give recitals at the weekend house parties of
local Scottish aristocrats.
Throughout Charles’s
youth, he was pushed through demanding institutions for which he was
neither temperamentally nor intellectually suited, and where rules
and standards had to be discreetly adjusted to accommodate him. When
he went to Cambridge University, the master of Trinity College, Rab
Butler, insisted that he would receive no “special treatment.”
But the fact that he had been admitted to Trinity at all, with his
decidedly below-average academic record, suggested otherwise, as did
the colloquium of academics convened to structure a bespoke
curriculum for him, and the unusually choice suite of rooms
(specially decorated by the Queen’s tapissier) that he was granted
as a first-year student. When he received an undistinguished grade in
his final exams, Butler said that he would have done much better if
he hadn’t had to carry out royal duties.
In the Royal Navy,
which Charles entered at his father’s prompting, his superiors,
faced with his “inability to add or generally to cope well with
figures,” sought to “build in more flexibility and to tailor
duties closer to his abilities.” They changed his job from
navigator to communications officer, and his performance reports laid
diplomatic emphasis on his “cheerful” nature and “charm.”
Even Charles’s
love life was choreographed for him with the sort of elaborate care
and tact usually reserved for pandas in captivity. Throughout his
twenties, his public image was that of a dashing playboy. But this
reputation appears to have been largely concocted by the press and
his own aides, in an effort to make an awkward, emotionally immature
young man more appealing and “accessible” to the British public.
Charles’s great-uncle Lord Mountbatten blithely informed Time that
the Prince was forever “popping in and out of bed with girls,”
but to the extent that this was the case it was thanks mostly to the
assiduous efforts of his mentors. Having told Charles that a man
should “have as many affairs as he can,” Mountbatten offered up
his stately home as a love shack.
Mountbatten also set
to work finding a suitable woman for Charles to marry. At the time,
virginity was still a non-negotiable requirement for the heir
apparent’s bride. (“I think it is disturbing for women to have
experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage,”
Mountbatten wrote to Charles.) Thus, Camilla Shand, the “earthy”
woman with whom Charles fell in love at the age of twenty-three, was
regarded as an excellent “learning experience” for the Prince but
decidedly not wife material. Charles seems to have accepted this
judgment and the stricture on which it was based, more or less
unquestioningly. Almost a decade later, his misgivings about marrying
Lady Diana Spencer, a woman twelve years his junior, whom he did not
love, or even know very well, caused him to weep with anguish on the
eve of their wedding, but he went through with it anyway, believing
that, as he wrote in a letter, it was “the right thing for this
When that marriage
exploded, Diana’s superior instincts for wooing and handling the
press insured that Charles emerged as the villain of the piece. But
it seems safe to say that the union visited equal misery on both
parties. One of the chief marital shocks for Charles was Diana’s
lack of deference. He had assumed that the slightly vapid teenager he
was settling for would at least be docile, but she turned out to be
the biggest bully he had encountered since Gordonstoun. She taunted
his pomposity, calling him “the Great White Hope” and “the Boy
Wonder.” She told him that he would never become king and that he
looked ridiculous in his medals. When he tried to end heated
arguments by kneeling down to say his prayers before bed, she would
keep shrieking and hit him over the head while he prayed.
Charles had always
disliked the playboy image that had been thrust upon him, feeling
that it did a disservice to his thoughtfulness and spirituality, and
part of what he hoped to acquire by getting married was gravitas:
“The media will simply not take me seriously until I do get married
and apparently become responsible.” The strange artificiality of
his youthful “achievements,” and the nagging self-doubt it
engendered, seems to have left him peculiarly vulnerable to the
blandishments of advisers willing to reassure him that he was
actually a brilliant and insightful person, who owed it to the world
to share his ideas.
The canniest of
these flatterers, and the one who had the most lasting impact, was
Laurens van der Post, a South African-born author, documentary
filmmaker, and amateur ethnographer. He dazzled Charles with his
visionary talk—of rescuing humanity from “the superstition of the
intellect” and of restoring the ancients’ spiritual oneness with
the natural world—and then convinced Charles that he was the man to
lead the crusade. “The battle for our renewal can be most naturally
led by what is still one of the few great living symbols accessible
to us—the symbol of the crown,” he wrote to the Prince. It’s no
wonder that Charles was seduced. The life of duty opening up before
him was a dreary one of cutting ribbons at the ceremonial openings of
municipal swimming pools and feigning delight at the performances of
foreign folk dancers. Here was an infinitely more alluring model of
princely purpose and prerogative.
Under the influence
of van der Post and his circle, Charles began exploring
vegetarianism, sacred geometry, horticulture, educational philosophy,
architecture, Sufism. He received Jungian analysis of his dreams from
van der Post’s wife, Ingaret. He visited faith healers who helped
him uncork “a lot of bottled feelings.” Staying with farmers in
Devon and crofters in the Hebrides, he played at being a horny-handed
son of toil. He travelled to the Kalahari Desert and saw a “vision
of earthly eternity” in a herd of zebras. On his return from each
of these spiritual and intellectual adventures, he sought to share
the fruits of his inquiries with his people.
Over the years,
Charles has set up some twenty charities reflecting the range of his
Bouvard-and-Pécuchet-like investigations. He has written several
books, including “Harmony,” a treatise arguing that “the
Westernized world has become far too firmly framed by a mechanistic
approach to science.” He has sent thousands of letters to
government ministers—known as the “black spider memos,” for the
urgent scrawl of his handwriting—on matters ranging from school
meals and alternative medicine to the brand of helicopters used by
British soldiers in Iraq and the plight of the Patagonian toothfish.
He has given countless speeches: to British businessmen, on their
poor business practices; to educators, on the folly of omitting
Shakespeare from the national curriculum; to architects, on the
horridness of tall modern buildings; and so on.
The stances he takes
do not follow predictable political lines but seem perfectly
calibrated to annoy everyone. Conservatives tend to be upset by his
enthusiasm for Islam and his environmentalism; liberals object to his
vehement defense of foxhunting and his protectiveness of Britain’s
ancient social hierarchies. What unites his disparate positions is a
general hostility to secularism, science, and the industrialized
world.
“I have come to
realize,” he told an audience in 2002, “that my entire life has
been so far motivated by a desire to heal—to heal the dismembered
landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape,
where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions
between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and
soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a
sacred flame.”
The British tend to
have a limited tolerance for sacred flames. They are also
ill-disposed to do-gooders poking about in their poisoned souls.
(“The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker,”
George Orwell once observed.) What’s more, Charles’s sententious
interpretation of noblesse oblige leaves him open to the charge of
overstepping the constitutional boundaries of his position. A
constitutional monarchy requires that the sovereign—and, by
extension, the prospective sovereign—be above politics. Their
symbolic power and their ability to work with elected governments in
a disinterested manner depend on their maintaining an impeccable
neutrality on all matters of public policy. The Queen’s enduring
inscrutability is often cited as one of the great achievements of her
reign, and she has fulfilled her duties to everyone’s satisfaction,
with no mystical knowledge beyond dog breeding and horse
handicapping. Charles’s refusal to shut up about his views and his
brazen efforts to influence popular and ministerial opinion have
provoked much ridicule, as well as more serious rebukes. Both
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had occasion to complain—to him
and to the palace—about his interference in the legislative
process. “I run this country, not you, sir,” Thatcher is alleged
to have told him. But Charles has shown no signs of repentance.
Indeed, he has repeatedly indicated that he intends to continue his
“activism” after he ascends the throne. “You call it meddling,”
he told an interviewer nine years ago. “I would call it mobilizing,
actually.”
Historically, the
question of how the Prince of Wales should occupy himself while
waiting for his parent to die has rarely found a satisfactory answer.
Many heirs to the throne have incurred opprobrium on the ground of
moral turpitude. A hundred and fifty years ago, in “The English
Constitution,” Walter Bagehot noted the temptation for bored
princes to become fops and fornicators, and concluded that “the
only fit material for a constitutional king is a prince who begins
early to reign.”
But Charles, who has
been waiting to become king longer than any previous Prince of Wales,
does not boast a distinguished record of degeneracy. His greatest
known sin is to have resumed his relationship with Camilla while
still married to Diana. It’s true that some of the revelations
regarding this infidelity were not strictly consonant with the
dignity of a future king. In an alleged transcript of a phone
conversation between the adulterous couple, the public learned that
the Prince yearned to be his ladylove’s tampon. But while it is
certainly a dark day for England when the Italian press is emboldened
to speak of the heir apparent as “Il Tampaccino,” few have gone
so far as to suggest that Charles is too debauched to become king.
Oddly, and perhaps
rather tragically, the severest damage to his reputation has come not
from his modest history of vice but from his strenuous aspirations to
virtue. “All I want to do is to help other people,” he has
written. The fact that so many are ungrateful does not deter him: he
accepts that, like any of the great men in history who have dared to
go against the grain, he must endure derision. “It is probably
inevitable that if you challenge the bastions of conventional
thinking you will find yourself accused of naivety,” he observed in
the introduction to “Harmony.” He is honor-bound to ignore the
scorn, and to march on. In 2015, when the Guardian won a ten-year
battle to release two batches of the meddlesome “black spider
memos,” under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, he was
unabashed. A spokesman defended the Prince’s right “to
communicate his experiences or, indeed, his concerns or suggestions
to ministers” in any government, and, by then, the law had been
obligingly changed to make much royal correspondence exempt from
future release. Not long after, there appeared a two-volume,
1,012-page compendium of Charles’s articles and speeches from 1968
to 2012. The books, which retailed at more than four hundred dollars
a set, were illustrated with his own watercolors and bound in
forest-green buckram on which his heraldic badge—three feathers, a
crown, and the motto “Ich dien,” meaning “I serve”—was
emblazoned in gold. ♦
Zoë Heller
contributes to The New York Review of Books. She has published three
novels, including “Notes on a Scandal.”
Prince
Charles Won't Step Aside for William to Be King
His biographer,
Sally Bedell Smith, spent four years exhaustively researching the
Prince of Wales.
by STEPHANIE
MANSFIELD
APR 10, 2017
Sally Bedell Smith,
dogged biographer and author of Prince Charles: The Passions and
Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, out this week from Penguin Random
House, has collected an exhaustive file of facts about the future
king of England. Unlike his mother, Charles is not what you might
call a beloved figure. And while Bedell Smith doesn't spare the
touchy-feely, parapsychology loving, Dumbo-eared Charles, her
portrait is also rich with sympathy, even affection.
Bullied as a youth
by his overbearing father (“Philip was the original alpha male,”
Smith says), Charles spent his whole life seeking approval. Cowed by
a sense of duty and fearful of even minor mistakes, the
well-intentioned, protocol-loving Charles married Diana because his
father said he should. No matter that he may have been in love with
Camilla Parker Bowles—she didn't pass muster.
Smith tells of her
subject’s "Rosebud" moment: "His childhood marked
him in ways I fully didn’t understand," she says. When he was
eight years old, he visited the Mountbatten estate for a formal lunch
and the attendees were all eating wild strawberries. Charles was
methodically picking them stems off the berries. Lord Mountbatten
told him, "No, no. You hold them by the stems to dip in the
sugar."
“And there this
poor little boy was, trying to reattach the stems. He just wanted
approval,” Smith says.
She is sitting in
her warm, painting-filled apartment in the Kalorama neighborhood of
Washington, D.C., a shilling’s throw from where the Obamas and
Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner live. Whip-smart and
gregarious, she has finally emerged from the four-year process of
trying to make sense of the much-vilified, slightly odd, enigmatic
heir to the British throne.
Yes, he will be the
monarch. “Charles will be King and Camilla will be Queen. They will
not skip over to William, who is being groomed to become King
probably in his late 40s or early 50s,” says Smith.
Some delicious dish
from the unauthorized biography was recently revealed in the London
tabloids. Yes, Charles cried on his wedding night while “the
extremely turbulent” Diana was battling bulimia. He grew
increasingly jealous of the attention paid to his late, glamorous
wife who, while in her shadow, he seemed to fade into the vintage
Clarence House wallpaper.
"They’re all
going to blame me," Prince Charles said upon hearing news of
Diana's death. He was right.
What she learned is
how much Charles has accomplished, and how little credit he has been
given for his various passions.
“I gained a lot of
admiration for him," she says. "Sometimes you think, 'This
is so wonderful. You’ve saved Shakespeare for the schools!' And
then he’d be sort of spoiled and self-pitying and whining, and he’d
shoot himself in the foot and be stubborn and closed-minded. Look,
the English love eccentrics.“
But Charles was not
without guile. “The queen is very straightforward," Smith
says. But Charles "can engage in subterfuge, creating a little
conflict”—argy-bargy, as the British would say. Hearing news of
Diana’s tragic death, the first thing he said was, “’They’re
all going to blame me.‘ And he was right.”
Smith also delves
into the life of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Charles's
father, who she says bullied him as a child. Queen Elizabeth, who was
"remote," couldn’t really make up for her husband’s
lack of affection for his son. “He is, basically, soft. And that‘s
what Philip picked up on.”
Prince Charles is
now trying to be a grandfather, but he skipped George’s first
birthday party at Kensington Palace to attend an event at a red
squirrel sanctuary in Scotland. “I think he’s well-intentioned,
but he has not been involved to the degree the Middletons have,”
Smith points out.
Charles has much in
common with Royals from another century, but he can also be immensely
warm and charming. “The epiphany I got was how he could be very
traditional and also very avant-garde. He has shoes made out of
18th-century reindeer leather. And also had this whole series of
gurus. There was a yearning to have people understand him. “
On Charles's
later-in-life love Camilla, Smith says, "she's got this vibey,
sexy thing. As Joan Rivers said, ‘She's rough around the edges. In
a nice way.’ He can be rowdy and fun with her.” In the public
eye, “I think she’s made a lot of progress … but she‘s not
necessarily beloved.”
She says there is
much drama in the actual House of Windsor, recently brought to
Netflix with the series The Crown. “You don’t have to watch
that,” Smith says with a laugh. “The real stuff is better.”
Stephanie Mansfield
is the author of The Richest Girl in The World: The Extravagant Life
and Fast Times of Doris Duke.
Born Sally Bedell
Rowbotham
May 27, 1948 (age
68)
Bryn Mawr,
Pennsylvania
Nationality American
Other names Sally
Bedell, Sally Smith
Education B.A.
Wheaton College
M.S. Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism
Occupation Biographer
Employer Vanity Fair
(contributing editor)
Agent Amanda Urban
Notable
work Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (January 2012)
Board member
of Deerfield Academy
The Buckley School
826DC
Columbia Journalism
Review
Spouse(s) Stephen G.
Smith
Children Kirk Bedell
Elisabeth Bedell
Clive
David Branson Smith
Awards 1982 Sigma
Delta Chi Award for magazine reporting
1986 fellow at
Freedom Forum Media Studies Center
2012 Washington
Irving Medal recipient for Literary Excellence
2012 Goodreads
Choice Award for Elizabeth the Queen.
Website www.sallybedellsmith.com
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