Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (16 page)

They first danced for the cameras two years earlier, also in Australia. Then there was a spark in the marriage, and the Prince grinned as he steered Diana through arc turns. By the time of their 1985 tour, the Waleses find themselves acting out cheery story lines for their gullible audiences. Their union has already met its dynastic goal, producing an heir, William, and a spare, Harry. The Prince and Princess dote on their sons but barely tolerate each other. They live separately for much of the time. Within a year, both of them will have committed adultery. Diana believes Charles has already done so, from the outset of their marriage. This detail and other claims and counterclaims will become the subjects of countless studies: articles, books—fact, fiction, and genres in between—plus documentaries, movies, and art projects, as well as diverse legal investigations. The Internet will provide a platform for everything from solemn tribute sites to the wackiest of conspiracies. Interest gutters but always flares again.

If it seems extraordinary that a relationship severed by divorce in 1996 and more permanently by death the following year should still mean something to so many people, that is because the union intended as a symbol and guarantor of tradition became, in its unraveling, an agent of change. The nuptials had done more than provide light relief from the fractious reality of recession and a government determined to push through harsh reforms; 21.7 million Britons and as many as 850 million viewers worldwide sat glued to their sets to watch what the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie with unintended acuity termed a “fairy tale” in his address to the congregation. This was an event of significance not only to its principals and to the interlocking institutions of the establishment they represented, but to a global constituency that found in their story a unifying ideal. The failure of that ideal is still playing out.

The Prince is an activist and provocateur. His greatest ambition is to drive change, but he certainly never imagined or hoped that his first marriage would contribute toward a more skeptical society or encourage a fiercer media. These changes appall him and impact him. Diana haunts him.

So although old history, this period of his life remains active history, the prism through which much of the world perceives him. He was born in 1948 but his most enduring public persona emerged during his mother’s “annus horribilis,” 1992, with the publication of Andrew Morton’s portrait of Diana in June and the formal announcement of the Waleses’ separation by Prime Minister John Major to the House of Commons in December.

The Prince on show today, the one closely observed for and in this book, has developed a veneer of assurance and below it the stirrings of real confidence. It is easy in the company of this Charles to accept the most firmly rooted interpretation of his first marriage: of a substantially older man who chose a child bride for dynastic rather than romantic reasons, recoiled as she cracked under the strain of public and palace life, betrayed and cold-shouldered her. Many aspects of the tale hold true, yet there is a missing piece that, once slotted into the image, subtly alters it. This doesn’t excuse the pain the Prince caused Diana but it helps to make sense of what happened. Twelve years and seven months separated the couple, a gulf between their generations. But Planet Windsor operates on a different calendar to earth. In human years Diana’s bridegroom was almost as unformed as she was herself, barely out of his teens.

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As Nicholas Soames shakes with laughter, the towers of paperwork on his desk threaten to topple. The idea tickling him is that he and his childhood friend might have been more sophisticated than their contemporaries because they had the run of palaces. “We were not experienced men of the world. Absolute balls, that is. It’s just so funny, all that. It’s an absolutely preposterous idea. Charles was at Gordonstoun, which he hated, and I was at Eton, and we saw each other in the holidays and we lived an incredibly simple, straightforward—OK, we were very lucky—but we lived a very simple life,” says Soames. “The idea that this was wonderfully glamorous.…”
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When the Conservative Member of Parliament for Mid Sussex grimaces, which he does frequently during a long and discursive conversation at his Portcullis House offices, his resemblance to his maternal grandfather Winston Churchill is inescapable.

Soames has remained close to the Prince since they met as twelve-year-olds, apart from a period of exile when the Prince tried to mollify Diana by cutting ties with old friends. “I’m sixty-six tomorrow,” Soames says. “I’m sixty-six years old. It’s a lifetime. And for two years in the middle of that lifetime I didn’t see him at all. For two years he was married to Princess Diana. He was kept under lock and key.”

The slip about the length of the royal marriage—which in legal terms endured for more than fifteen years, and in public perception from wedding day to disintegration achieved a stretch of at least a decade—is revealing. It was during the first years of the marriage that the Prince made consistent efforts to please his wife and find equilibrium within the relationship. During that period, says Soames, the Prince “was just trying desperately, in my judgement. He was desperately trying to make it work and was trying quite rightly to make every concession to make that happen.”

Diana always viewed Soames as an enemy, and she had reason to do so. He was one of only a handful of friends of the Prince to question the wisdom of their engagement and to remain immune to her charm offensive. His loyalty to the Prince is boundless and a touch bromantic. “He’s absolutely amazing,” says Soames at one point. “I’m not just holding a candle for him. He just is.” To supporters of Diana—and after all these years, the world and royal circles still divide into Diana and Charles camps—Soames’s testimony is too partial to be valuable. Yet his fervor tells its own story about how the Prince has lived much of his life, surrounded by people who feel moved to fight his cause. More than that, Soames is a mirror image of Charles, the sort of person the Prince’s background and breeding might have been expected to produce, hearty and largely uncomplicated. “His pleasures were those of the countryside,” says Soames. “I didn’t go to university; I went straight into the army; but the Prince went off to Cambridge and I should think Cambridge was a very sophisticated life for him. He wasn’t sophisticated in the sense you understand it. His manners were sophisticated and he had sophisticated tastes, I suppose, but he wasn’t sophisticated in the ways of the world in any sense at all.”

Soames illustrates his point with an anecdote. In 1970, he became equerry to the twenty-one-year-old Prince, and the two men traveled together. “We went to the most marvelous places. We stayed with this woman. She was a very famous actress called … Jesus Christ!” Soames strikes his forehead. “I can’t remember what her name was. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. We stayed in rooms in her house. She was a friend of Lord Louis [Mountbatten] and Prince Philip’s. Would it be Merle Oberon? We stayed in her house and everything was electronic. You’d never seen anything like it. You pressed a button and the curtains opened. I remember thinking ‘this is way above our pay grade.’ It was like playing with a dodgem set.”
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The Prince who found electric curtains exciting found pretty young women electric, though there would always be rumors about his sexual preferences, not least because dating him turned out to be a chaste experience. It was hard enough for him to meet potential girlfriends, much less “sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can,” as Mountbatten urged the Prince in a letter to do.
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A bleak childhood that simultaneously entrenched the idea of his social superiority and instilled a sense of deep inferiority had left Charles ill equipped for a relationship of equals. His position gave him almost no chance of learning unobserved.

Girls expecting to meet the Prince of press reports—a dashing action man, “fearless, full-of-fun Charlie” as one alliteration-loving hack dubbed him, the world’s most eligible bachelor—discovered a starkly different reality.
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As a student and later a naval officer, the Prince possessed neither freedom of spirit nor of movement. The isolation that had dogged his schooldays endured. Lucia Santa Cruz, one of few close friends forged at university—and never, she says crisply, a girlfriend, despite misleading reports—recalls that when the Prince returned from a six-month deployment in the Navy, he wrote to ask her to meet him when his ship docked. He had nobody else to welcome him home. “Everybody was being met by somebody and I felt so sorry,” she says. “I was already engaged and it was quite difficult because of what the press were saying [about their relationship] but I thought, ‘I can’t let him down.’ That was an instance of how precarious his emotional support was, really.”
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Diaries and bleak letters written during that period chart a series of encounters more comical than romantic. At a nightclub in Acapulco, he sat rooted to his chair, summoning up the nerve to ask “a lonely-looking girl” to dance, only for her to turn him down “in a terrifying American accent.”
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According to Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography, when the Prince’s ship arrived in Hawaii, the royal tremulously accepted an invitation to accompany two women to their apartment only to realize that the naughtiness they had in mind consisted in persuading him to smoke a joint. His protection officers and local police waited outside. He made his excuses and left.

Back in Britain, his opportunities for meeting women were even more circumscribed. Friends, and the ever-attentive Mountbatten, tried to help out by organizing group outings and parties with potential candidates for royal romance. One of these candidates—who prefers to remain anonymous—joined the Prince in the royal box at a theater with several other young hopefuls. She and the Prince exchanged only a few words, but the next day he called and haltingly asked her out. This was an era when a first date more usually involved a trip to the cinema or a visit to a pub. Charles issued an invitation to lunch at Windsor with the Queen and Prince Andrew followed by a polo match.

Subsequent dates followed a similar pattern, hemmed in by protocols and the Prince’s worries about the press. “He was very concerned about the effect the unwarranted attention would bring to me,” says his former flame. “But there was no preparation, then or at any time, no advice from courtiers [regarding] travel plans and avoiding press, which was odd considering they were the enemy.” Finding time in the Prince’s schedule, planned to the minute months in advance, added a further layer of difficulty. Nothing could be spontaneous. Dinner parties were staid affairs. “People would be having fun, relaxing, smoking out of the windows, but then before he arrived they’d stub out cigarettes and stand to attention.” Guests, including this girlfriend—by now accorded that label by Prince and press—addressed him as “Sir,” bowing or curtsying as he entered the room. She once thwacked her forehead on the princely chin, bending the knee as he leaned forward to kiss her. She doubts he was aiming for her mouth. Throughout the not inconsiderable time as his official squeeze, they rarely kissed on the lips, much less spent a night together.

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The distorting culture of Planet Windsor magnified the proprieties of the time. The sort of gels deemed suitable to be royal girlfriends must also fit the bill as suitable future wives. The Prince should leave them untouched and intact. Mountbatten advised his great-nephew that a man of his standing should “choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for. After all, [your] Mummy never seriously thought of anyone else after the Dartmouth encounter [with Prince Philip] when she was 13!” He added this helpful insight: “I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.”
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Royal girlfriends who failed to meet these criteria quickly learned how icy the Queen and her courtiers could be.

Sexual experience was to be gained with experienced women, preferably married. Lady Dale Tryon, an Australian married to an English peer, was widely reported to be just such a paramour based on the testimony of her friends and the journalists she contacted while promoting her fashion business, Kanga. This was her nickname, devised, she let it slip, by Charles. The logistics of affairs, usually more complicated for the parties involved than premarital dating, were for the Prince a little easier to manage than his official love life. The landed gentry regularly hosted house parties and would welcome the wandering heir as an overnight guest. He was holidaying with Kanga and her husband at their lodge in Iceland when he heard the news of Mountbatten’s murder.

Such relationships introduced the Prince to warmth and intimacy, but only in small portions. He never had to negotiate with his lovers, beyond figuring out plans for assignations. (An illicit recording of a telephone conversation in 1989 between the Prince and Camilla, then Mrs. Parker Bowles, contains a detailed discussion about which friends’ house they might use for a meeting, the likelihood of encountering traffic on the possible route, and even which route to take.) Liaisons came with ready-made boundaries: they started from the premise that they could never be acknowledged; the demands the women might make on him were limited.

Failure to observe these rules carried risks. By the time Kanga died in November 1997, not yet fifty, she no longer belonged to the Prince’s inner circle. Crippled by an unexplained fall from the window of a rehabilitation clinic called Farm Place where she had gone to try to shake an addiction to painkillers, she had later been detained under the Mental Health Act. Four months before her death from septicemia, she had spotted Charles at a polo match, attempting vainly to reach him in her wheelchair. Officials blocked her route. A source says he did not see her. He may never have done so clearly.

Only Camilla has ever been able to be fully herself around the Prince because she has nothing to hide from him. Robust and cheerful, she entered the relationship free from neuroses and, ironically, from any expectation of being his Queen. Lucia Santa Cruz brought the couple together in 1971. “My father was Ambassador in London for five years and then he came back to Chile,” says Santa Cruz. “I stayed on and Camilla and I lived in the same building. She was on the ground floor, I was on the second floor. Although I’d known her before, we became very, very close because I was left on my own and she was amazingly kind and generous. We saw each other every day. I never did forget the first Christmas I was on my own: I spent it with her family. They made a pillow full of presents.”