The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  But not so special as to create controversy. Her Majesty knew better than to allow cameras to accompany her to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor on the morning of March 31, 1969, for the secret reinternment of her father. She knew the public might be jolted to learn that the King’s body had lain unburied for seventeen years in an oak coffin locked in a small passageway under the castle. So she ordered the Windsor grounds closed to the public and summoned the royal family† to the chapel, where the Dean of Windsor, the Right Reverend Robin Woods, conducted the solemn burial service in private.

  Throughout the filming, the BBC crew took direction from the Queen. At one point the producer suggested she exercise one of her corgis. Her Majesty insisted on exercising all of them. Her husband, who despised his wife’s nipping dogs, exploded.

  “They want one of the fucking animals, do you understand?” snapped the Duke of Edinburgh. “Not fourteen fucking dogs.”

  In the film, that scene showed the Queen without her husband but with all her corgis.

  The BBC producer described the film as historic. “I’m sure people will find it fascinating because it will show the role of the monarchy, the day-to-day running carried on in private, and how the monarchy fits into the present day and age.

  “It’s terribly important people should understand it’s not a film about ceremonies. What they really want to know about is what the Queen does, what goes on inside the Palace, what the job consists of…. It won’t be a formal type, but more of a film about people than buildings and ceremonies. The object of any documentary is to show people as they really are.” He reassessed his view after seeing the effect of his film on people: “Monarchy is PR…. Public relations—a focus for public interest—is what it is all about.”

  The anthropologist David Attenborough had told the producer that the documentary would kill the monarchy. “The whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut,” he said. “If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.”

  The television cameras stayed in the Queen’s hut for seventy-five days and even accompanied her on a state visit to Chile. More than forty hours were filmed at a cost of $350,000. The 105-minute* documentary, entitled Royal Family (but nicknamed Corgi and Beth), was seen by forty million Britons in June 1969. It was shown again in December, which is why the Queen canceled her annual Christmas Day message that year. “Enough is enough,” said the Palace, but twenty thousand Britons disagreed and wrote letters protesting her not delivering the yuletide address.

  “The most exciting film ever made for television” was how the BBC commentator introduced the show to viewers. Then they watched their Queen and Prince Charles prepare a salad at a family barbecue while Prince Philip and Princess Anne grilled sausages and steaks.

  The Queen tested the salad dressing by poking her little finger into the mixture and licking it. She grimaced. “Oh, too oily,” she said. She added more vinegar, pronounced the dressing perfect, and walked over to her husband. “Well, the salad is finished,” she said.

  “Well done,” said Prince Philip. “This, as you will observe, is not.”

  In another scene, the Queen, known to her subjects as the richest woman in the world, fingers a fabulous necklace of rubies. She says how much she likes it and that it came to Queen Victoria from the ruler of Persia. Then, in a puzzled voice, she turns to her lady-in-waiting and asks, “I have actually worn this, haven’t I?”

  Minutes later the monarch, who supposedly never handles money, goes into a shop with her four-year-old son, Prince Edward, to buy him a sweet. She pays, saying she has just enough cash on her to cover the bill.

  In another scene, the Queen laughs as she asks her family: “How do you keep a regally straight face when a footman tells you: ‘Your Majesty, your next audience is with a gorilla’? It was an official visitor, but he looked just like a gorilla.” The Queen said she could not hide her laughter.

  “Pretend to blow your nose,” advised Prince Charles, “and keep the handkerchief up to your face.”

  The Queen did not need to censor the film beforehand, although her husband worried that she might be concerned about the scene where Prince Charles shows his youngest brother how to tune a cello. In tightening the instrument, Charles breaks the A string, which grazes Edward’s cheek, stinging him to tears. After screening the film, the Queen said, “It’s the sort of thing that can happen to anyone.” She pronounced the film fine just as it was.

  Most of the critics agreed, including the Times, which editorialized about the importance of the documentary in showing the advantages of the British system of monarchy, especially when the sovereign is trained in the duties of royalty and is surrounded by a family with similar training and tradition of service.

  “A romp with royalty,” raved one critic. “Everyone deserves a bow for this show.”

  “The refurbishing of the royal image that has been going on for some time now has been managed with some skill,” wrote William Hardcastle, a former newspaper editor, “and skill in this field involves judgment of when enough is enough. My guess is that ‘Royal Family’ is at the completion of a process rather than a herald of further revelations to come.”

  Little did he know. The monarchy had used television to enhance its image because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Only years later would it look like a blunder.

  ELEVEN

  Prince Charles peered at the poster on the dormitory wall with its photo of three young women sitting on an Edwardian sofa. The girls smiled invitingly under their slouch-brimmed hats. One long-haired beauty wore sandals; the other two were barefoot. The caption read “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.” Proceeds from the sale of the poster supported the draft resistance.

  “Appalling,” said the Prince, shaking his head. “Bizarre and appalling.”

  The Prince of Wales was not a man of his times. While many Cambridge students were protesting the war in Vietnam, he was playing polo. He avoided political activists, whom he called “nutters.” And he disliked hippies. He called flower children “freaks” and damned feminists as “idiotic man haters.” He loved the Goons, a group of British comedians known for broad humor and brash antics. (Germans referred to the group as Die Doofen, or “The Stupids.”)

  Charles celebrated himself as old-fashioned. “I am proud to be a square,” he said. While other young men streamed into singles’ bars and took part in the sexual revolution, the Prince of Wales sipped cherry brandy and held on to his virginity. He stood ramrod straight during the swinging sixties and praised the sanctity of marriage. He declared he would not wed before the age of thirty.

  By the time he was eighteen, the world’s richest* teenager still hadn’t gone on his first date. But three years later, in his last year at Cambridge, he was seduced by a young South American girl, who was a research assistant to the master of his college. Following his sexual initiation, Charles took a string of lovers, and he instructed each to call him “sir”—even in bed.

  “I adore Prince Charles,” said novelist Barbara Cartland, “and Lord Mountbatten, whom I was very fond of, always said Charles would make a great King. Dickie helped him become a man by giving him the privacy he needed at Broadlands [Mountbatten’s estate] to discreetly entertain young women. Away from the prying eyes of the press.”

  Charles looked up to Mountbatten as “the most brilliant and kindest of great-uncles/grandpas,” and Mountbatten reveled in that role. “Mostly, he enjoyed acting as royal procurer,” surmised John Barratt, Mountbatten’s private secretary. “We arranged several weekends at Broadlands for Charles to entertain young women—Lady Jane Wellesley, a direct descendant of the Duke of Wellington; Lucia Santa Cruz, daughter of the Chilean Ambassador; and Camilla Shand, whose great-grandmother Alice Keppel was the mistress of Edward VII, Charles’s great-great-grandfather. Camilla later married Major Andrew Parker Bowles. She was quite pleasant and frisky, but Charles
was a late bloomer.† Pity he was too inexperienced then to know that she would become the love of his life.”

  One young woman Mountbatten served up was his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, the second daughter of Lord and Lady Brabourne.† Nine years younger than Charles, Amanda fired her grandfather’s dynastic fantasies. Mountbatten saw her as the next Queen of England and, ever the scheming matchmaker, did all he could to foster her relationship with Charles, who was her second cousin. Mountbatten invited them to spend weekends with him at Broadlands and threw them together on family vacations. After one such holiday in the Bahamas, Charles revved Mountbatten to new heights by writing, “I must say Amanda really has grown into a very good-looking girl—most disturbing.” When Prince Philip learned of Mountbatten’s matchmaking, he approved. “Good,” he said. “It beats having strangers come into the family.” Until Amanda was old enough to be considered seriously, Mountbatten advised Charles to become “a moving target” for women. In a letter, he recommended taking many lovers:

  I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down but for a wife he 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 when she was 13! I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.

  He advised Charles to shop carefully for a wife. “A buyer must have a hundred eyes,” said Mountbatten, repeating an Arab proverb. “He instructed him to choose only wealthy young women from the upper classes,” said Barratt, “because their money and social position would insure discretion.” When asked if it was true, as reported in a book, that Mountbatten had set up a private fund administered by a British lawyer through a bank in the Bahamas to pay off “troublesome conquests” and “one-night stands” who might embarrass the Prince of Wales by their disclosures, Barratt smiled. “Sounds absurd, but Lord Louie would have done anything to protect Prince Charles and the monarchy.”

  Mountbatten portrayed his protegé as the most eligible bachelor in the world, a sexual magnet to women. He compared him with movie stars like Warren Beatty and bragged to Time that Charles enjoyed “popping in and out of bed with girls.” Privately, though, Mountbatten fretted about how emotionally immature the Prince was. “He falls in love too easily,” Mountbatten told Barbara Cartland. “And he does cling so.”

  The press followed Charles whenever he appeared in public with a date, tracking him across Alpine ski slopes and Caribbean beaches. Some reporters even followed him when he did not expect press coverage. “I remember sitting in the bushes watching Charles attempt to make love to Anna Wallace on the beach of the river Dee at Balmoral,” recalled journalist James Whitaker. “Moments before the royal wick was lit, he spotted us crawling on our bellies with binoculars. He jumped up and hid in the bushes, leaving poor Anna to pull up her knickers. He was a wimp that day. He hid and cowered and left the young woman unprotected. He shouldn’t have done that—I was ashamed for him—but, of course, I didn’t print the story. He is, after all, my future King.”

  On paper, HRH Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland looked impressive.

  But he was like the man Jane Austen described in Sense and Sensibility: “The kind of man everyone speaks highly of but no one wants to talk to.” With his fusty manner and furrowed brow, he looked like a worried clerk. Uncertain and indecisive, he seemed overwhelmed by the weight of his titles and his country’s expectations. Destined to become Charles III, the forty-first sovereign of England since 1066, he knew he was different.

  “I am not a normal person in the normal sense of the word,” he told the press. “I can’t afford to be. I have been trained in a certain way, even programmed, if you like. My parents have always been most careful with this, obviously to the benefit of the throne of England. But this has tended to isolate me from normal life.”

  Sober and somber, the Prince exuded a heavy weariness—so much so that his classmates at Cambridge wrote him off as a dolt and a plodder.* “He walks into a room like a dark cloud in a double-breasted suit,” said one. Even his closest friends called him “the old soul.”

  “Charles is not a fast-car sort of man,” said a Cambridge classmate. “He’s all stick-out ears and bobbing Adam’s apple—the little boy that grandmothers fancy.”

  A rapt listener, and extraordinarily polite, Charles, unlike his blunt sister, tried hard to please. But if he hadn’t been Prince of Wales, he would have been ignored. Growing up with people bowing and curtsying and walking backward in front of him made him arrogant and haughty, but still he managed to maintain a certain earnestness that made him likable. He dressed in custom-made suits, starched shirts, gold cuff links, and silk ties; his shoes shone like mirrors. Like his great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, he was known for his sartorial splendor. Fastidious about how he looked, especially in uniform, Charles patted himself down before making public appearances and muttered his checklist: “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch.” Amused by the ritual, British Ambassador Nicholas Henderson said, “I gather this is part of the royal routine, at any rate for male royals.”

  Although Charles looked elegant and acted polished, he was ill at ease. He frequently twisted the gold signet ring bearing the three plumes of the Prince of Wales that he wore on the little finger of his left hand.

  “I think it was the ears,” mused a former courtier to the Queen. “He never outgrew those unfortunate ears. A shame, really….” He said that the Prince’s protruding ears became a source of amusement within the royal family, and he was teased constantly, which made him quite self-conscious. Princess Margaret urged her sister to let Charles undergo plastic surgery, but the Queen resisted. When Margaret’s son, David, was three years old, she saw that he, too, was developing what she called “the Windsor flappers.” So she sent him to a plastic surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children to have his ears pinned back.

  Mountbatten continually badgered the Queen and Prince Philip about getting their son’s ears fixed, but they did nothing, so Mountbatten urged Charles to ask his parents about plastic surgery. “You can’t possibly be King with ears like that,” he said. The late photographer Norman Parkinson was so dismayed by the Prince’s ears that during a sitting for a formal portrait, he pinned them back with double-sided sticky tape.

  “Charles is not a common swashbuckler like his father,” continued the courtier. “He’s kind, sweet, but unsure of himself. Yes, I’d say it was the jug ears more than anything. It certainly wasn’t parental neglect… at least on the part of the Queen.”

  The former courtier staunchly defends his monarch as a mother while struggling to answer the question of how Charles grew up.

  “His Royal Highness was a tentative little boy. Correct, well mannered, but rather timid like Her Majesty,” said the courtier. “He was uncertain on a horse. His sister, who shared a similar upbringing, was bold and rambunctious, like her father…. She should have been the boy, and Charles the girl.”

  “I was asked in Australia whether I concentrated on developing or improving my image—as if I was some kind of washing powder, presumably with a special blue whitener,” Charles told reporters. He tried to be offhand and humorous but came across as clumsy. “I daresay that I could improve my image in some circles by growing my hair to a more fashionable length, being seen in the Playboy Club at frequent intervals, and squeezing myself into excruciatingly tight clothes…. I have absolutely no idea what my image is, and therefore I intend to go on being myself to the best of my ability.”

  Reporters peppered the Prince with questions about what kind of woman he would make his Queen. They referred to his various girlfriends—slim, long legged, and usually blond—as “Charl
ie’s angels,” reporting that the world’s most eligible bachelor sought safety in numbers. Charles admitted that he was afraid of marriage because he was not permitted to make a mistake. “Divorce is out of the question for someone like me,” he said. “In my position, the last thing I could possibly entertain is getting divorced. Therefore, one’s decision must be that much more careful.”

  Mountbatten had recommended a pragmatic approach to marriage that Charles now parroted back to the press. “If I’m deciding on whom I want to live with for fifty years—well, that’s the last decision I want my head to be ruled by my heart,” he said. “I think an awful lot of people have got the wrong idea of what marriage is all about. It is rather more than just falling madly in love with someone and having a love affair for the rest of your married life.”

  In fact, Mountbatten had cautioned him against falling in love. He said Charles could not afford that luxury. “I can still hear him say that falling in love is not an option for the man who would be king,” recalled John Barratt. “ ‘Leave that to your cousin,’ Mountbatten advised.” He was referring to Prince Michael of Kent, who was sixteenth in line to the throne when he fell in love with Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz. She was hardly an appropriate choice for a man in the line of succession to the British monarchy. She was divorced, a Roman Catholic, and worse yet, a German, whose father had been a Nazi. The royal family has had other Nazis—the Duke of Coburg, brother of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, was a Nazi.