A Prince and His Princess Arrive
By Richard Stengel
You mean to say you haven't received an invitation yet? Maybe it got thrown away along with that sweepstakes offer or wedged inside the Sears catalog. Perhaps you just didn't notice it, what with all the bills and such. Just in case: it probably had engraved lettering on white kid stationery and the words "On the occasion of the visit of Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales." No? Well, perhaps it hasn't arrived; such things do happen. You might want to call the White House to see if the invitation was misplaced, or try the National Gallery of Art to verify whether you are on the guest list for their black-tie soiree. If all else fails, there is probably still time to scribble out a $10,000 check to the United World College of the American West and attend the gala dinner in Palm Beach, Fla.
If, by chance or mistake, it turns out that you have not been invited, do not despair. Neither have some 231,964,159 other Americans, give or take a dozen or so. Only a select seraphim of the moneyed and powerful will meet Charles and Diana when they make their three-day visit this weekend to Washington and then, after a brief frenzy of sight-seeing, partygoing and media deluge, hop down to Palm Beach for a round of polo and another party. But after all, what are you missing? Up close, Charles is a polite, diffident, self-conscious fellow, a man who, at 36, after years as a junior executive, is still a long way from inheriting the family business. Yes, Diana is charming, and at 24 she has become stunningly self-assured. But she will not be sharing palace confidences with her dinner companions nor making anything but the politest prattle ("The salmon is awfully good, don't you think?"). Charles and Diana are world-class illusionists, modern masters of the deflective gesture, hinting at intimacy while keeping their distance.
No, the real show is the one everyone will be able to watch: the royal vaudeville, with the tireless duo dashing on- and offstage, making dozens of costume changes, playing all the roles themselves, and shadowing forth what their life is like behind the curtain. For the audience, there is the added spectacle of normally snooty folks falling all over themselves to meet the royal performers.
Charles and Diana are arguably the most famous, the most glamorous couple in the world. They are also, for what it is worth, the putative future King and Queen of the United Kingdom. It is unavoidable that they be relentlessly scrutinized, endlessly clucked over and often wickedly sniped at. Of late, however, they have stirred up even more than the usual ruckus on three separate continents. Two weeks ago, they captivated an audience of 18.6 million when they appeared in an unprecedented 45-minute interview on ITV, Britain's independent television network. (U.S. viewers will be able to see a portion of it this week on ABC's 20/20.) They talked soberly about their responsibilities and delightedly about their children, and resolutely scotched nearly every rumor that has been flitting around them.
Gossips have speculated that the dream couple has not been living happily ever after. Onscreen, they displayed the gentle chafing that is the sign of marital harmony, not discord. Diana, far from coming across as the Princess Peabrain that some have called her, was confident and rarely tongue-tied; with that ever so sly, slightly lidded look of hers, she imparted the gentlest hint of irony to the proceedings. The coaching that she received from Gandhi Director Sir Richard Attenborough paid off. Charles even provided a touch of Piccadilly farce by draping a handkerchief over his head to distract Sons William, 3, and Henry, 1, and then mugging like an attenuated version of his great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. The children were amused.
Last week as the Prince and Princess were in the midst of their twelve-day trip to Australia, Charles was the center of a political brouhaha at home. Rod Hackney, an architect who advises Charles on community planning, had told the press that the Prince was deeply concerned about urban and racial unrest and did not want to succeed to the throne of a divided Britain. It came out that the Prince, who has recently been depicted as something of a royal layabout, has actually been making clandestine visits to the homeless of London and seeking advice on how to remedy inner-city decay. Critics of the government applauded, while Conservatives gave indignant speeches protesting what they saw as a breach of the taboo against royalty dabbling in politics.
The Australian trip revealed the couple's considerable public relations skills, and turned into a showcase for their uninhibited style of royal excursion. With her nimble spontaneity, Diana is invigorating the staid ritual of the walkabout, the traditional version of which presents a gloved and hatted royal frowning to show interest as a dusty foreman laboriously explains how a widget is manufactured. Touring an aluminum smelter in the city of Portland, Diana could not stop giggling at the sight of Charles wearing a too small hard hat and protective goggles; with his Clark Gable ears, he looked rather like a Volkswagen with both doors wide open. A sheepish Charles turned to one man and said, "Does your wife laugh at you when you put a hat on?"
Preparations for the couple's arrival in the U.S., meanwhile, were spiked with a bit of scandal. Originally it had been announced that the co-chairman of the $10,000-a-couple Palm Beach charity ball would be Pat Kluge, the dishy wife of Billionaire John Kluge, chairman of Metromedia, Inc. Last week the British press uncovered a part of her past that had eluded the careful perusal of Buckingham Palace. In the 1970s the former Patricia Rose had posed as a full-frontal nude for the raunchy British skin magazine Knave. It transpired that Mr. and Mrs. Kluge will be traveling abroad the night of the ball.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the eponymous city of the man who fought to have the inequities of hereditary privilege purged from a new nation, socialites and politicians were maneuvering like Machiavellian courtiers in order to meet the Prince and Princess. "It's the social event of the season," said former White House Aide Michael Deaver, who now heads his own p.r. firm. "This is one of those events that if you're not invited," said Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, "you'll plan to be away for the weekend so no one will know." Miss Manners, a.k.a. Washington Post Syndicated Columnist Judith Martin, decried the social jockeying not only as "a disgusting spectacle" but, worse, as undemocratic. Above all, she exhorted patriotic readers, "never curtsy."
Wherever the couple go nowadays, they are watched closely for signs of the state of their union. Time and again during the past year, their four-year- old storybook marriage has been compared with a nighttime soap opera. The plot goes something like this: the House of Windsor, imperturbable on the outside, has become a seething "Palace Dallas" on the inside. The Princess, once known as Shy Di, has been transformed into "Dynasty Di"; and Prince Charles, once dubbed Action Man for his intrepid sky- and skin diving, has become a hermetic, mystical crank.
But if "The Windsors" is like a prime-time serial, it is one that, before Lady Diana Spencer joined the cast, was having ratings problems. The characters had become predictable: no more wildly inappropriate flings for Princess Margaret; prickly Princess Anne had turned goody-goody; crusty Philip made nary a gaffe; and the Queen, as ever, was placid perfection. For Charles, the role of bachelor Prince was becoming old hat; the public grew tired of a succession of Charlie's Angels but never a bride. Then, like an inspired casting director, Charles picked an unlikely ingenue for the role of Princess: the girl next door. Voila! She became the biggest star of all and made "The Windsors" the most watched show of all time.
Diana has become a British national monument. According to one recent tally in The Book of Money Lists, the Princess of Wales is a bigger draw than Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament combined. In the past two years she has generated some $66.6 million in revenue from magazines, books and tourism.
Diana herself, over the course of four years of marriage, has undergone a transformation. She began as a reticent, slightly plump kindergarten teacher from Sloane Square, the trendy headquarters of London's gilded youth. She has become an elegant, magnetic and outgoing woman who no longer shirks the spotlight. Goodbye, Laura Ashley primness; hello, Margaret Howell panache. The retiring Sloane Ranger is now a glittering femme fatale. When she wore her hair in a '40s upsweep to the opening of Parliament last year, there had not been such a fuss since Guy Fawkes tried to blow the place up; ermine-swathed earls opened their eyes for the first time in years, and scarcely anybody paid attention to the Queen's Speech from the Throne. Diana is also attracting a whole new generation of Britons to the monarchy. When the couple dropped in at the Live Aid concert in London in July, they got a standing ovation from the young, T shirted crowd. In an age when movie actors are the only royalty for most people, Charles and Diana are the real, the greater thing: royalty as superstars.
Monarchy, with its archaic pomp and ceremony, usually embodies the age that is passing rather than the one that is arriving. The secret of Diana's rejuvenation of royalty is that she embodies today. She is a postfeminist woman, the new-fashioned old-fashioned girl who mixes "trad" and pop. She embraces the role of wife and mother with a dash of flair. Even her problems are trendy: the speculation about her sometimes shaky adjustment to her new life makes Diana seem regular, contemporary. She is royal in an original way, proving that one does not have to be stuffy to be regal.
When Their Royal Highnesses arrive in Washington on Saturday morning, it will be Diana's first trip to America. The visit to the capital is not unlike Ronald Reagan's going to London to see a rodeo, for they are patrons of the National Gallery's grandiose exhibition of treasures from Britain's stately country homes (see following story). At the top of their itinerary is morning tea with the President and Nancy Reagan. Then, after Diana visits a hospice and Charles stops by the American Institute of Architecture, they return to the White House that night for a black-tie dinner in the State Dining Room. "Nancy has put together a guest list that will interest them," says Deaver. "It's mainly not Washington people." Among the names: Cosmetics Queen Estee Lauder, Actor Peter Ustinov and Artist Jamie Wyeth, plus such Reagan regulars as Betsy Bloomingdale, the Walter Annenbergs and Social Moth Jerry Zipkin.
On Sunday Charles and Diana are to attend services at the Washington Cathedral, take a private, 90-minute tour of the National Gallery exhibition, then go by helicopter to join an elite handful of guests for a luncheon at Philanthropist Paul Mellon's country estate in Upperville, Va. That night they will be the guests of honor at a formal dinner at the British embassy, where they are also staying. On Monday the couple will perform a more typically prosaic duty by trooping off to a suburban JCPenney store to bless the chain's nationwide "Best of Britain" merchandising campaign. Monday night Charles and Diana will meet some "young leaders" of America at the National Gallery. The requested emphasis on youth probably reflects Diana's tastes, for it is said that she finds Charles' older friends rather starchy.
Charles and Diana are not exactly two peas in a pod. He adores opera; she revels in rock 'n' roll. He plows through historical biographies; she leafs through romance novels. He loves polo; she prefers the pool. Yet they do appear to be in love. Assorted smooches in the woods and snuggles on the polo field are the public sparks of what seems a private passion. Their public displays of affection are thawing out the normally frozen reserve of royal protocol. Charles and Diana try to spend as much time together as possible. The breakfast hour is kept sacred; during their stay at the embassy, for example, they will probably not be intruded upon much before 8 and will take breakfast in their homey, three-room suite.
While they are both adjusting to married life, Diana has the added % difficulty of getting used to living in the crystal palace of royal life. In addition to the loss of privacy, the duties--opening factories, pressing thousands of hands, walking about dreary industrial towns--can be as tedious as they are arduous. The ITV interviewer, Sir Alastair Burnet, asked Diana whether she had anticipated that she would not even be able to walk down a street without kicking up a fuss. Her forthright answer: "No. I didn't."
Charles and Diana are determined to raise their sons as normally as possible, lest they become little potentates in a kingdom of petticoat power. One of the first signs of Diana's resolve was her decision to give birth to Prince William in a hospital, despite the Queen's preference that she lie in at the palace. Diana then chose a decidedly unstuffy and untraditional nanny named Barbara Barnes (Prince William calls her Ba-ba). Diana is not of the children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard school of absentee royal mom. She is a hands-on mother, and some palace observers say that Barnes is driven half- batty by Diana's frequent nocturnal visits to the nursery.
Diana spends as much time as she can with the children. She often plays with the boys in the morning in the walled garden at Kensington Palace, where there is a sandbox and a swing. Charles, who has less time, is far warmer with his children than his father was with him. (William calls him Daddy; Charles called his father Papa.) Recently Diana, concerned that she and Charles would be late for an appointment, found him in the bathtub with Wills (as William is known in the family), splashing about and having a jolly old time.
Diana and Charles decided that Wills would be the first royal heir to attend a regular nursery school alongside other children, classmates who may one day be subjects of King William V. Charles remembers the lonely hours he spent being tutored at Buck House and did not want the same for his son. Every morning, with a small flask filled with fresh orange juice, Wills trots off to Mrs. Mynors' nursery school, a terraced Victorian house in the multiracial Notting Hill section of London.
Diana has made her presence felt belowstairs as well as above. Among the staff, she is known as "the Boss." Since her arrival at Kensington Palace, some 40 employees, including dozens of Charles' personal staff, have left. Some of these departures were due to natural attrition; others were nudged by the lady of the house. Palace observers suggest that she was intent on - eliminating servants and staff who were any of the following: stuffy, bossy, too familiar or gay. For generations, many of the palace staff have been known as confirmed bachelors, a euphemism for homosexual men. "She just doesn't want them around her family," says James Whitaker of the Mirror, who has long been Diana's fawning tabloid Boswell.
Some of the staff have left of their own volition. Alan Fisher was hired as a palace butler after having served in that capacity for Bing Crosby. "They are wonderful people," says Fisher, who left in 1984, "but incredibly boring." Stephen Barry, Charles' valet of twelve years, left to write what was billed as a tell-all book about his years with the prince. The book, Royal Service, disproved the adage that no man is a hero to his valet by depicting Charles as a cross between Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Bertrand Russell.
The most significant departures were those of Oliver Everett, Diana's private secretary, who left in 1983, and Edward Adeane, Charles' longtime private secretary, who departed six months ago. Everett, a polo-playing pal of the prince's and Diana's cicerone for two years, grew frustrated by what he thought of as Diana's capriciousness and asked to be shifted. Adeane, a barrister by profession, had been Charles' private secretary for six years. He saw his role as guiding the prince toward kingship. The reasons for his leaving are unclear. Some say that Adeane was annoyed by the incessant foofaraw made over Diana, while Diana felt that Adeane was too straitlaced. The post was empty for six months. In September it was announced that Sir John Riddell, director of the bank Credit Suisse First Boston, would fill it.
Diana's relations with her in-laws are said to be mixed. She maintains that she and Princess Anne (though they are as different as grape and grain) have "always hit it off very well." But palace pundits suggested that Anne's decision to go galloping through the Gloucestershire countryside chasing rabbits while Prince Henry was being baptized at Windsor expressed her aloofness from Charles and Diana, as well as pique that she had not been chosen the child's godmother. (There were six godparents, headed by Charles' brother Prince Andrew.) Diana's relationship with her mother-in-law is amiable but not close. "A bit like the Queen and the Prime Minister," says one source. "A healthy respect, but no great affection." The Queen, who is the staunchest, most vigilant protector of the monarchy, is nonetheless well pleased by Diana's invigoration of the crown.
Diana sometimes finds the tribal rites of the royal family heavy going. For years the holiday schedule has been an inflexible routine: Windsor at Christmas, Balmoral in the summer, a cruise aboard the Britannia to Scotland in August. The family is relentlessly outdoorsy; they like nothing better than to put on their macs and picnic in the chill air of the Scottish Highlands. After the meal, they all go tramping through the heather with a pack of pesky corgis nipping at their heels. Not exactly Diana's idea of a giggle. For her the royal sing-alongs with Princess Margaret plinking the ivories just do not compare with listening to Dire Straits on her trusty Walkman.
When Diana does manage to get out of the house on her own, she displays the friskiness of a boarding-school student on a weekend of freedom. At a recent charity ball in London, she wore a silver drop-dead, bare-backed, broad- shouldered gown. Instead of leaving at midnight like a proper Cinderella, as is the royal custom, she was still dancing at 2:30. A month later, while Charles was away, her sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale persuaded Diana to go to a country house ball in Leicestershire. The bachelors were too timid to ask her to dance. Exercising royal fiat, Diana grabbed one young man and said, "Come on, for goodness sake, let's dance." She did, until 4 a.m.
To combat the Balmoral Blues, some palace watchers suggest, Diana has followed a course of shopping therapy. Feeling low? Then just take a spin out to Harvey Nichols and buy a few Bruce Oldfields. "Fashion isn't my big thing," Diana insists. But during the first year of her marriage, when she was assembling a royal wardrobe, her clothes and accessories reportedly cost about $2,500 a week. For trips abroad she plots her outfitting like a general drawing up plans for battle, studying the slick fashion magazines, then huddling with favorite designers. She also practices a kind of guerrilla shopping. Dressed in jeans, she will slip out of the palace by 10, driving her red Ford Sierra with the obligatory detective next to her, and head for a favorite boutique for a quick try-on.
Practicality, not chic, is a royal consideration. "You'd be amazed what one has to worry about," she says. "You've got to put your arm out to get some flowers, so you can't have something too revealing, and you can't have hems too short because when you bend over, there are six children looking up your skirt." Diana has shifted from the rather frumpy, pastel suits of the engagement period to sleek, sophisticated ensembles and romantic hats. For evening wear she favors slinky numbers with daring back slits or fairy-like gossamer gowns. What is engaging about her sense of style is that she chooses clothes with a touch of wit, even if she occasionally looks like a fashion casualty. After years of seeing the Queen Mum parading around in hats that look as though a bird of paradise had expired on her head and the Queen looking like a dour librarian, even Diana's Di-sasters, as the tabloids call them, are refreshing.
Nor has Diana overlooked Charles, who has been given a minor make-over by his wife. She has spruced up his young-fogy image by getting him to wear brighter ties, striped shirts and less somber suits. She also persuaded him to allow her haircutter to give him a slightly longer, less plastered-down look that makes his ears look less prominent.
Charles, for his part, sometimes seems rather lost. After years of being the No. 1 royal attraction, he has been eclipsed by his wife. This both irks and relieves him. Becoming a father and taking a supporting role have made this reflective, well-meaning man even more introspective. Years ago he had seemed to pass from gawky youth directly to a kind of complacent middle age. Only now does he appear to be going through a kind of belated identity crisis, questioning the certainties that he once routinely accepted.
In a long conversation last summer with Andrew Stephen, a senior editor of the London Sunday Times Magazine, Charles at times sounded downright angst- ridden. "The more sophisticated, the more technologically advanced we become, and the more we feel we can dominate nature," he mused, "the more we feel that it's one of those difficult ironies to bear that we should actually depart and shuffle off this mortal coil." After years of stiff formality, he yearns for simple verities, and talked longingly about the rewards of working with his hands on a farm in Cornwall. "I think it's terribly therapeutic, funnily enough, and there's something very important about working on land and actual manual labor, mucking out cattle yards, you know, and things like that." But Charles is also hardheaded: using innovative agricultural practices and more rigorous management, he has increased profits from his patrimony, the Duchy of Cornwall, his major source of income.
Charles is attracted to certain strains of New Age thinking. He longs to combine pragmatism with compassion. He is an admirer of the "small is beautiful" philosophy of the British economist E.F. Schumacher, and is a patron of a charity that Schumacher started to help Third World nations develop simple industrial and agricultural tools. As president of the British Medical Association during 1982, he stressed the need for what he calls "complementary medicine"--that is, "looking at a person not so much as a machine, but as the whole, in a classic, ancient sense." Charles is drawn to asceticism: he apparently fasts occasionally and rarely eats red meat. He shies away from being called a vegetarian, maintaining that he simply prefers fish and fowl. Diana, who also eschews meat, attributes her imperial slimness (which some palace watchers have whispered was anorexia) to the fact that at public functions "it's impossible to talk and eat at the same time."
As to the rumors that Charles has consulted clairvoyants and dabbled with a Ouija board in order to contact his beloved uncle, Lord Mountbatten, who was assassinated by I.R.A. terrorists in 1979, the Prince is incredulous. "I feel riveted by the way this has developed because I've seen articles saying I play with Ouija boards," he said on ITV. "I don't even know what they are."
In part Charles' restlessness may reflect a desire to redefine his public role. Observes Royal Biographer Robert Lacey: "He has to develop a strategy for the ten to 20 years before he takes the throne. He cannot spend them politely expressing interest in problems." The Prince, indeed, seems on the verge of becoming an activist. He spends considerable time and effort on the "youth initiative" of the Prince's Trust, a program that helps young people start their own businesses. Troubled by high British unemployment rates, he would like to extend the scheme to every major city in the country. He has spoken of the responsibility that Big Business has to help the urban poor. "I just feel that sometimes, not too often, I can throw a rock into a pond and watch the ripples create a certain amount of discussion." Charles threw a rock through the plate-glass window of modern architecture last year when he decried the sterility of much contemporary British design. In a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, he castigated a proposed steel- and-glass addition to the National Gallery as "a monstrous carbuncle on the * face of a much-loved and elegant friend."
Along with worldwide attention and even adulation, Diana and Charles have come in for what some feel is an unfair share of criticism. The royal family, these observers suggest, cannot win. As the Times of London wrote in a recent editorial, "The public demands that (the royal family's) members embody fantasies which are contradictory: for freshness and sophistication, for novelty and stability." Paradoxically, that is precisely what the royal couple have been able to do, especially Diana. With her mixture of conservativism and modishness, of shyness and assurance, she conveys both continuity and spontaneity.
Charles and Diana are mirrors and exemplars of stalwart British qualities: civility, courtesy and coziness, with a dash of style and a bit of fun. Charles will need those qualities as King. His small-is-beautiful philosophy should come in handy as well, for Charles and Diana will be King and Queen not of imperial Britain but of a realm that has almost shrunk to the proportions of Shakespeare's sceptered isle.
Of royalty, the English economist and journalist Walter Bagehot wrote, "Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic." Charles and Diana have allowed the shutters to be opened just a crack. To spread them any further would spoil the illusion. To be modern, yet keep the mystique--that is the trick. It is a trick that Charles and Diana have gracefully mastered.
With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Mary Cronin/London and John Dunn/Melbourne