Yet the controversy over Zorreguieta’s past has never gone away completely: in November 2011, Brandpunt, a Dutch current-affairs programme, uncovered what it claimed was new evidence that the Princess’s father was indeed aware of at least a few of the cases of atrocities against civilians. The Labour Party said that just as he had stayed away from his daughter’s wedding, so he should be barred from attending Prince Willem-Alexander’s coronation when he ascends the throne.
The year 2004 saw the weddings of two of Europe’s crown princes, again both to commoners. On 14th May, as the strains of Handel’s coronation anthem, ‘Zadok the Priest’, rang out in Copenhagen Cathedral, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark married Australian Mary Elizabeth Donaldson. Eight days later, Prince Felipe de Borbón of Spain married Letizia Ortiz, a former television journalist.
Despite her lack of royal blood, Donaldson was in many respects the ideal bride. Born on 5th February 1972 in Hobart, capital of Australia’s island state of Tasmania, she was the fourth child of John Donaldson, a Scottish-born mathematics professor at the University of Tasmania, and Henrietta, who had worked as secretary to the university’s vice-chancellor. The parents, both from the little fishing village of Port Seton, east of Edinburgh, had been school friends and childhood sweethearts. They married aged just twenty-one in 1963, after John gained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. Several months later they emigrated to Tasmania, to join the rest of John’s family, who had relocated there already.
Mary’s childhood, spent in Taroona, a few miles’ drive from Hobart, was a comfortable suburban one. After school and at weekends, Morris Avenue, the street in which they lived, was filled with children of all ages who played together or went to the beach. Mary was especially close to her brother John, who was just eighteen months older than her.
After school Mary followed the rest of her family to the University of Tasmania, where her father was now dean of the science faculty; she took a bachelor’s degree in commerce and law. Like many Tasmanians Donaldson found the island constricting and moved to the Australian mainland, first to Melbourne, where she got a job in advertising, as a trainee with DDB Needham. She was soon promoted and then moved onto Mojo Partners, where she became an accounts manager. Pretty, talented and ambitious, she seemed to have everything going for her: but then in November 1997 her mother, known as Etta to friends and family, died suddenly at the age of fifty-five from unexpected complications following a heart operation. Mary, just twenty-five, was devastated.
Six months later, Mary left Melbourne and after a few months’ tour of Europe and America – including a spell in Edinburgh – took the next logical step for an energetic young Australian: she moved to Sydney, the country’s largest city, where she was offered a job as account director in the local branch of Young & Rubicam. Soon after she moved to Love Communications, a major advertising agency.
Mary has said she saw herself eventually becoming managing director of such an international firm, but her life was changed for good by the Olympic Games, which opened in Sydney in September 2000. Politicians and heads of state from across the globe travelled to Australia for the ceremony; among them were Frederik and his younger brother Joachim.
That evening the princes decided to go out on the town with Bruno Gómez-Acebo, the nephew of King Juan Carlos of Spain. Their guides were Katya Tarnawski, an Australian friend of the Spaniard, and her sister Beatrice. Gómez-Acebo had said he would bring along two friends – but did not reveal they were the two Danish princes. Beatrice had assumed they would be Spanish athletes and called a friend, Andrew Miles, asking him to “bring some nice girls” to balance out the numbers. Among them was Mary, who was Miles’s housemate.
The two groups met at the Slip Inn, a popular bar in Sussex Street, near the waterfront, where they ordered pizzas, beer and wine and chatted. Frederik was jet-lagged and burnt out after having just completed his pilot’s training back home, but quickly seemed to hit it off with Mary, who was seated next to him. Quite when she realized the true identity of her partner is not clear, but after the party moved on later to Establishment, a trendy bar and restaurant a few streets away, the others noticed that the pair were deep in conversation. “When I left Establishment, they were still talking,” Beatrice Tarnawski recalled later. “The next morning I talked to Andrew to evaluate the evening, and we concluded that something was afoot between Mary and Frederik.”8
Frederik clearly had the same feeling and the next day, after far too little sleep, called her. “There was something special about this girl, I felt, and she was by no means discouraging when I called her,” he recalled later. During the remaining weeks of the games, Frederik slipped away from his official functions to meet Mary several times, visiting her at the 1920s terraced house that she, Miles and other housemates rented at 20 Porter Street, near Bondi Beach. “I really felt she was a soulmate,” he recalls. “I was attracted by Mary in all respects. She was fantastic. To begin with, it was all somewhat secretive, but very lovely. If one was to visualize it, it was almost like a moonlit summer landscape. A calm lake, ambient, there’s a surface, but also depth.”9
The Danish press followed Frederik’s love life closely, but the journalists who had come to Australia to cover the Olympics were oblivious to the huge story unfolding under their noses – and the Prince was keen to keep it that way.
Frederik had to return home after the games, but he was determined to see Mary again. And so, just two weeks later, he flew back, halfway around the world, for what was billed as a five-week holiday to allow him to get to know better the country with which he had fallen in love during the games. In fact, it was Mary with whom he had fallen in love, and the couple spent much of the five weeks together, either at Porter Street or strolling in the city, hoping not to be spotted by a visiting Dane. Frederik got to know not just Mary but also her friends, who were struck by his down-to-earth manner.
During the following year, Frederik took the twenty-four-hour flight to Sydney at least five times; he spent much of the time with Mary in the city, but they also went on holiday together, on one occasion staying in a little cabin by the Queensland border and another time at a house on the coast just south of Sydney. Although a growing number of Mary’s circle knew the identity of her lover, the Danish media were still none the wiser – much to Frederik’s relief. “It was really good that the press didn’t suss things out and that our love was able to unfold and develop,” he told his biographers. “There were enough obstacles already. Not least the physical distance between us. But that year that passed before our deciding that something radical had to happen, we had to ourselves. It was an exciting time and an excellent test of how much we really wanted each other.”
The frequency of Frederik’s trips to Australia meant the secret was not going to keep much longer, however, and the Danish press began to suspect a romance lay behind his love for the country. In September 2001, the Danish gossip magazine Se og Hør published a cover story revealing, apparently much to Frederik’s amusement, that he was going out with Belinda Stowell, who won gold for Australia in the sailing at the Olympics.
The next month, Frederik travelled again to Sydney to see Mary, staying for two weeks. After a relationship that had lasted thirteen months, they had come to a momentous decision: they couldn’t continue living on opposite sides of the world, and, since he couldn’t go and live in Australia, Mary would have to come to him, even though this would mean she would have to leave family, friends and job behind. By the time he left on 9th November, their minds were made up.
Three days later Mary got a first taste of her new life. Late that afternoon, as she was leaving her office at Belle Property, the estate agent where she was now working, she was confronted by Anna Johannesen, a reporter with Se og Hør’s rival, Billed-Bladet, which describes itself as “Denmark’s Royal Weekly Magazine”. Johannesen had a simple question: “Are you going out with the Crown Prince?” “No comment,” was Mary’s reply. But the secret was
out. Three days later, she was pictured in a tight red skirt and black blouse on the front of the magazine. The couple had enjoyed more than a year together undisturbed. Now their relationship was out in the open.
To Mary’s horror and surprise, she found herself surrounded by photographers almost everywhere she went; an Australian freelancer was even employed to go through her rubbish bin in the hope of picking up an interesting snippet about her shopping habits. After a month, she gave up her lease on Porter Street and went to Paris to teach English, and then, in spring 2002, moved to Copenhagen.
The couple began to see more and more of each other, and Mary, who had got a job with Microsoft, built up a network of Danish girlfriends, who helped her to furnish the flat she moved into at Langelinie in Copenhagen, a few minutes’ walk from Amalienborg, the main royal residence where Frederik was living.
Signs multiplied of the growing seriousness of their relationship: during Christmas that year Queen Margrethe was seen with the couple at a cinema in Aarhus, where they watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Then in January 2003 the couple had their first public kiss – on the dock in Hobart, where Frederik was taking part in a sailing competition. It was only a peck on the cheek, but enough to create a sensation back home. Danish television showed it again and again, even in slow motion.
After keeping Mary – and the Danish public – waiting and waiting, Frederik finally proposed in September 2003 during a mini-break in Rome; going down on one knee and speaking in English, he asked if she would marry him. “You can’t say no, you mustn’t say no, you have to say yes,” he told her. He wasn’t disappointed.10
Later that day Frederik called Per Thornit, his chief of household, from Rome, telling him he could send out a press release announcing the royal engagement. The couple meanwhile had another four or five days to themselves, which they spent in a hotel on the Adriatic coast a few hours’ drive from Rome.
The Queen gave her formal blessing to the union at a council of state on 8th October. Two hours later, after meeting members of the government for a champagne toast, the couple stepped out onto the balcony of the Amalienborg Palace and waved to the twenty-thousand-strong crowd below. That afternoon, at a press conference broadcast live on television, Danes were able to get a measure of the woman who was destined one day to be their queen.
While Mary Donaldson’s past was blissfully free of complications, Letizia Ortiz, the future wife of Felipe, Prince of Asturias and heir to the Spanish throne, presented a serious potential problem: she was a divorcee. Divorce and royalty have long been incompatible – as Edward VIII’s experience with Mrs Simpson showed – and the issue remained a particularly sensitive one in traditionally Catholic Spain. Divorce had not been permitted during the long years of Franco’s dictatorship and even after it was legalized in 1981 it remained stigmatized, with many couples preferring instead to remain married but live apart. In the case of Letizia, however, the Spanish public appeared ready to forgive and forget.
The future Princess of Asturias was born Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano on 15th September 1972, the daughter of a journalist turned union leader, in the tranquil northern city of Oviedo. She went to La Gesta School there before her family moved to Madrid, where she attended the Ramiro de Maeztu High School.
Letizia appears to have decided early to follow her father into the media, studying journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she obtained both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After a brief spell in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she worked at the newspaper Siglo XXI, she returned to Spain and went into television, working for the Spanish version of Bloomberg and for CNN+.
During all that time Letizia had been having a relationship with Alonso Guerrero Pérez, a man ten years her senior whom she had first met while he was teaching literature at her high school. On 7th August 1998 at a simple civil ceremony in Almendralejo, Badajoz, they married. Their union did not last, and after just a year they broke up.
Letizia’s media career, in the meantime, was taking off. In 2000 she moved to TVE, the Spanish state broadcaster, where she was given a mixture of increasingly prestigious reporting and presenting assignments, covering events ranging from that year’s US presidential elections and the 9/11 attacks to the American invasion of Iraq, winning several awards for her work. Then in August 2003 she became the anchor of Telediario 2, TVE’s daily evening news programme and the most viewed newscast in Spain.
By then her relationship with Felipe had already become serious. They had met at a dinner party at the end of the previous year in Galicia, in the north-west of Spain, where Letizia had been sent to cover the environmental disaster caused by the sinking in November 2002 of the Prestige oil tanker. Older than her by five years and, at 6'7", towering head and shoulders above her, the Prince was dark, dashing and blue-eyed; he was also single since breaking up in December 2001 with Eva Sannum, the Norwegian model.
Felipe’s relationship with Letizia moved very quickly. The couple became closer in the spring of the following year, even though their meetings were interrupted by assignments such as her trip to Iraq. By September the Prince felt sure enough about their relationship to introduce her to his parents. Yet still the Spanish media knew nothing about her. Then on 1st November, out of the blue, the palace announced that Felipe was getting engaged to Letizia. The surprise was total: “I’m a journalist, I know how to shake people off,” was how Letizia explained it to her colleagues.
The newspapers were enthusiastic: far from being seen as a disadvantage, Letizia’s lack of a noble background appeared a strong point in her favour. The contrast with the royal origins of Felipe’s mother, Sofía, a Greek princess, added to the modernizing feel. “The future queen is a Spanish woman who is very representative of our time: young, professional, a traveller, independent and with personal and professional experiences in common with millions of her compatriots,” enthused El País.
Its right-of-centre rival, El Mundo, agreed: “The fact that the Prince has chosen a journalist whose face is very familiar is a sign of modern times,” it said. Nor did it think her divorce should be an obstacle to their marriage. Spaniards seemed to agree: in a quick poll conducted by the newspaper, seventy per cent of respondents said they supported the marriage, with thirty per cent against. Five days later, Felipe formally asked for Letizia’s hand in marriage, giving her a gleaming diamond and white gold ring before they came out to face hundreds of journalists at El Pardo Palace, just outside Madrid.
Despite the initial euphoric reaction to the announcement, there were concerns in the months that followed that the “wedding of the century”, as the Spanish press were calling it, would be spoilt by discussion of Letizia’s suitability. Aided by the conservative government of José María Aznar, the palace went to extraordinary lengths to suppress intrusions into the future princess’s past: it was claimed that newspaper editors had been warned by authorities against publishing negative commentaries, while the divorce papers from her previous marriage were reportedly placed under twenty-four-hour guard in a 590-kg safe purchased specially for the purpose. This did not prevent some mildly embarrassing photographs emerging on the Internet, although there were doubts as to whether they were genuine. Some sites rather cruelly dubbed the future Princess of Asturias “Putizia”, a combination of her name and puta, Spanish for whore, and speculated about her past sex life.
The damage was limited, however: her former husband, Guerrero, who was said to have been “briefed” by palace officials and even visited by the security services, made clear he was not going to sell stories about his past life with Letizia to the media – and when he was interviewed he confined himself to wishing the couple well. Such noble behaviour did not go unrewarded, especially when he began publishing books. The label “El ex marido de la Princesa de Asturias” (“The ex-husband of the Princess of Asturias”), which was inevitably attached to Guerrero’s name, undoubtedly helped with publicity, even if he had to continue to fend off questions about his former wife
whenever he appeared.
Felipe was also helped by the Catholic Church. Although not normally welcoming to divorcees, it was prepared to overlook Letizia’s first marriage on the grounds that it had taken place in a register office – which meant there was no barrier to their getting married in the Catedral Santa María la Real de la Almudena in Madrid.
The mood changed on 11th March 2004, some two months before the date scheduled for the wedding, when Islamic terrorists attacked four packed commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring a further 1,700. The pre-wedding euphoria was replaced by shock and mourning. It also brought a political change: Aznar, who had tried to blame the attack on Basque separatists, lost the election three days later and was replaced by José Luis Zapatero, the Socialist leader.
Unlike Aznar, Zapatero was no royalist and, to general surprise, called for the rules of succession to be changed to put women on an equal footing with men – which was widely seen as an attack on Felipe, who has two elder sisters and owes his place as heir to male primogeniture. Other members of the newly resurgent left complained about the cost of the wedding, due to run into millions of pounds. Felipe cancelled two prenuptial parties, donating the money that would have been spent to the families of the victims of the bombings and towards the cost of a monument.
Set for 22nd May, it was the first royal wedding on Spanish soil since Felipe’s great-grandfather, Alfonso XIII, married Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg in 1906. On that occasion, the bride and bridegroom narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by an anarchist with a bomb. This time, thankfully, amid heightened security, which involved twenty thousand police on patrol and the closing of airspace above the city, the wedding passed off peacefully – although it was marred by driving rain.
The Great Survivors Page 29