The royals - Kitty Kelley [114]
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 “Charlie’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