The royals - Kitty Kelley [113]
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