The African trip had other moments of carefully scripted spontaneity. There was Charles posing for the cameras at a rock concert as his 13-year-old son, Prince Harry, blissfully held hands with a Spice Girl. Charles at a dinner hosted by President Mandela, praising the charitable contributions of Diana; Charles sharing a few warm words with, of all people, Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, who had so pointedly criticized the royal family in his eulogy to his sister. By the standards of an American politician, the public displays were modest, even quaint. But by the standards of the House of Windsor, Charles’s speeches, smiles and jokes added up to a roaring charm offensive.
It worked. RE-BORN TO RULE, trumpeted the Sun, Britain’s largest daily (circulation: 4 million) and one of the prince’s most strident critics in the past. Asked the normally anti-royalist Guardian: ““Could the death of Diana have had a liberating influence on our future King?''
Possibly. While Diana was alive, Charles was trapped in an unwinnable PR war against a glamorous and skillful manipulator. Now, if Charles appears to be a steadfast father and shows just a little human touch, he can begin to rebuild his public image. Still, Diana haunts her former husband: by becoming the ““People’s Princess,’’ Diana redefined the role of the crown. It is no longer enough to be lord of the realm and Defender of the Faith. Modern monarchs must show they care. The public expectation creates a dilemma for Charles–one that may put in conflict his desire to be a good father with his need to show that he is one.
In fact, he is certainly a better parent than Queen Elizabeth or Prince Philip, whose approach to child rearing seems to have been equal measures of neglect and ridicule. While less cozy and spontaneous than Diana, Charles is hardly cold or indifferent. Friends say that the boys clamber all over the Prince of Wales at family gatherings and greet him with a kiss. The public caught a glimpse of this natural affection in South Africa as Charles, with evident warmth and his hand placed lightly on Harry’s shoulder, introduced dignitaries to ““my son.’’ Prince William has told friends that he feels safe with his father, that Charles protects his sons’ privacy. Their mother, on the other hand, was at times the source of some embarrassment. Although Diana was larky and fun, she courted publicity. In a typical example, one London editor told NEWSWEEK, tabloid photographers received a call from a woman ““with a posh voice’’ telling them that if they went to Waterloo Bridge at a certain time, they would find the Princess of Wales and one of her sons ““comforting the homeless.’’ The photographers were not disappointed.
Charles could try to follow Diana’s publicity-seeking example. But if he does, he risks making his children into props in the tabloid melodrama he abhors. Blamed for hounding Diana, the press is on a streak of good behavior–but the good surely will not last. And for all his recent joshing with reporters, Charles still harbors what friends say is an almost obsessive contempt for the press. ““The disparagement in the media has eroded his self-confidence,’’ says Sir Jonathon Porritt, an environmental activist who often works with Charles. ““I’ve noticed it over the past decade. What was once a joke–‘Oh, people won’t listen to me’–is now not a joke.’’ When he’s feeling sorry for himself, a not infrequent occurrence, Charles believes that he is blamed by the tabs for driving Diana to bulimia and ultimately into the arms of a reckless playboy.
With his friends, Charles bitterly complains about the unfairness of it all. Still, he seems resigned to his fate. Those who know the prince say (though rarely for the record) that he is a peculiar combination of stoicism, sensitivity and self-pity. Born to inherit the powerless throne of a former empire, Charles believes he is doomed to be misunderstood. Still, he must soldier on; good breeding (a favorite word) requires it. Given no real role, he might have been tempted to indulge himself while awaiting his mother’s passing. Instead, he has pursued a range of eclectic interests and devoted far more time to charity than the sainted Diana. Though outwardly stodgy, he is a romantic spiritualist. Though nostalgic for a mythic England of small communities and benign aristocrats, he is trying to modernize the monarchy. It was Charles who argued, over the stubborn opposition of courtiers, that the British flag must be flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace before Diana’s funeral.
But Charles himself is not likely to change in any fundamental way. The prince, who turns 49 this week, has fixed habits: ““he rather likes his bath and his martini,’’ says a friend. He regards as ““impertinent’’ any suggestion that he alter his approach to parenthood, says this friend. ““He’s the very antithesis of the touchy-feely generation,’’ says another old chum, Nicholas Soames, a Tory M.P. ““He’s deeply sympathetic and has huge insights, but he’s always been his own man and he’s not going to trim his sails now.’’ Sources close to the palace say that Charles has continued to discreetly see his longtime paramour Camilla Parker Bowles at Highgrove, his country estate. After Diana’s death, it is clear that the British people do not want Charles to marry Camilla. But Charles’s friends say that the couple never intended to marry. They have their own lives and recognize the impossibility of a formal union.
The prince is a slave to duty. He grinds away at public appearances–more than 500 a year, an obligation made more bearable by his traveling entourage (usually, an equerry to handle logistics, a butler, a valet and a cook). And he quietly plugs away at his charities–360 of them, including The Prince’s Trust, which raises some $35 million a year. (Charles personally gives away between 5 and 20 percent of his $4 million to $5 million annual income.) Without fanfare, he routinely dispenses small kindnesses. Marjorie Wallace, who runs a mental-health organization called SANE, says that Charles chose to help her organization in part because its chief cause–schizophrenia–was ““unfashionable.’’ On several occasions, Charles has appeared late at night at the offices of SANE to chat with volunteers manning hot lines. When Wallace was herself undergoing treatment for cancer four years ago, Charles invited her for tea, sent her flowers and gave her oils for her bath. ““All this business about a stiff upper lip is really not very fair,’’ she says. ““I have seen him near tears, sometimes if he is just worried about friends. I remember him hugging me when I was really ill.’'
Some of Charles’s causes, once considered loopy, are now mainstream. Charles was called a ““crank’’ in 1984 for suggesting that a glass-and-steel addition proposed for the National Gallery looked like a ““monstrous carbuncle.’’ But most Londoners are now grateful for Charles’s crusade against ugly modernism. A longtime green, Charles has been called the Loony Prince because he supposedly talked to plants. Now the Duchy Originals line of foods, which includes cookies baked with organically grown wheat and oats from Charles’s estate, sells well enough to earn almost $1 million a year for Charles’s charities. Charles’s interest in holistic medicine was once ridiculed by the medical establishment. But 40 percent of Britain’s doctors will now refer their patients to ““alternative’’ healers such as acupuncturists or homeopaths.
In a speech to a group of doctors in mid-October at St. James’s Palace, Charles was able to laugh at the ““appalling’’ reaction he used to receive when he made provocative remarks. All the doctors praised his ideas about architecture, Charles quipped, while all the architects praised his ideas about doctors. Afterward, greeting his guests in a ceremonial hall, dapper in a gray bespoke suit, he was attentive and gracious, even to a pair of NEWSWEEK reporters. Told that one of them would accompany him to South Africa the next week, the prince inquired, without apparent guile, ““Whatever for?’’ He proceeded, however, to launch into a bitter screed against the British press. ““A nightmare!’’ he proclaimed.
THE MOMENT WAS PURE CHARLES–at once self-effacing and petulant. It is impossible to understand such apparent contradictions without recalling what he endured as a child. Shy and chubby, with protruding ears, Charles was casually tortured at his lord-of-the-flies boarding school, Gordonstoun. As Charles grew older, he adopted a protective skin of diffidence–while desperately exploring mysticism. He plunged recklessly down ski slopes and played polo with abandon. But his dark, wary eyes betrayed a sense of melancholy, and still do.
Charles was far from the Prince Charming that young Diana Spencer longed for. Nor was she, the child of a particularly nasty divorce, the jolly maiden he thought he was marrying. Both were full of needs that neither could meet.
Camilla, by contrast, is said to be everything that Diana was not: unassuming, accepting, discreet and, most important, someone who loves Charles with unquestioning devotion. She is not without a sense of humor. When Camilla learned that Diana’s nickname for her was Rottweiler, she began answering her phone, ““Rottweiler here.’’ But can she ever become a proper mother to Harry and William? It may even take time for the princes to accept Camilla as their father’s friend.
Above all, Charles must look to his sons. Public sentiment clearly makes Raising an Heir his most important duty. Charles’s own life choices were determined largely by committees of the Great and Good. The prince would like to show the boys the way himself, as he did with Harry in Africa, while giving them a bit more freedom. He would be pleased if William, 15, followed him into the Royal Navy but accepts that his son may find some other suitable form of service. Shy and sensitive like his father, William will need all the support he can get. He is blessed and cursed by inheriting his mother’s smashing looks. All his life he will have to deal with cameramen–some of whom his uncle Charles Spencer blamed for his mother’s death.
At Eton, William is watched over by his masters and schoolmates. The school is warm and fairly liberal, at least compared with many English boarding schools. It is, however, academically demanding, and William is said to be struggling at his studies. Eton is probably out of the question for Harry, who is not a strong student at Ludgrove, his ““preparatory’’ school, but is said to be popular and more carefree than his brother.
True freedom is something Harry and certainly William will never have. In the New Britain, the new monarchy will have to be close to the people, even if that includes people who carry cameras with long lenses. If the princes are lucky, they will inherit their mother’s grace and their father’s sense of duty. The harder question is whether they can escape their parents’ essential loneliness.
