The royals - Kitty Kelley [109]
The press agent told the Prince not to worry. “All the questions will be inane,” he said. And most were. But Philip handled them with breezy humor.
“Tell us about the London Symphony,” said a reporter in Miami.
“It plays good music,” said Philip.
“Have you considered sending your children to a U.S. school?”
“An absolutely truthful answer is no, but now you’re making me think about it. Hmmmm. The answer is still no.”
“What do you think of the success of the Beatles?* As an export product, don’t they bring more money into Britain?”
“It’s a very small return for some of the things imposed on Britain.”
“Is this your first visit to America?”
“No,” said Philip. “My first visit was during the reign of Harry Truman.”
“Why is the Queen’s birthday—”
“Don’t ask me to explain why it is that she has an official birthday in June when her proper birthday is in April. You’ll just have to accept it, like cricket, pounds, shillings, and pence, and other quaint British customs.”
Reporters were amused by the Prince, and in every city he received laudatory press coverage. He raised a million dollars for charity and returned home convinced that the Palace needed the British version of a Hollywood press agent. The Queen rejected his idea as utterly preposterous, saying that she did not have to sell herself or her monarchy.
“My father never did,” she said.
“He didn’t need to,” said her husband. “He had Winston Churchill and World War Two.” This prompted a quarrel in front of the footman.
Philip again referred to the Firm in front of a group of journalists. “To survive, the monarchy has to change,” he said. “No one wants to end up like a brontosaurus, who couldn’t adapt himself, and ended up stuffed in a museum. It isn’t exactly where I want to end up myself.”
He continued to badger his wife about the problem, but she did not pay much attention—until the morning he stormed into her bedroom suite, waving his copy of the Sunday Telegraph, the conservative right-wing royalist newspaper he once jokingly called “the family bugle.”
“You might be interested in this,” he said, slapping the front page down in front of her.
The Queen put on her spectacles and read the article about the “marked change in the public’s attitude toward the Crown.”
Philip paced up and down in front of the Queen’s footman.
Without comment she continued to read:
Most people care much less than they did—particularly the young, many of whom regard the Queen as the arch-square. They are not against in the sense of being for a republic. They are quite simply indifferent…. The British monarchy will not be swept away in anger, but it could well be swallowed up in a great and growing yawn.
A few weeks later, when her press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, retired, an energetic Australian, William Heseltine, succeeded him. “When I took over, things were bound to change,” he said. “The essence of the Queen’s role is communication, and it needed improvement…. During the sixties, the family had dropped from the news pages to the gossip columns. I wanted to rectify that by getting them back from the gossip columns onto the news pages where they belonged, and by making greater use of television.”
Heseltine’s first responsibility was to handle preparations for the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales.* Years before, the Queen had promised the people of Wales that she would present her eldest son to them at Caernarvon Castle. She decided that Charles was ready to be crowned a few months before his twenty-first birthday. She agreed to have the investiture televised because she felt the miniature coronation ceremony was part of the continuity of the monarchy.
The BBC television producer suggested making a biographical film of Prince Charles, but the Queen and Prince Philip said no; they thought their son was too inexperienced to handle unscripted questions. The producer