The royals - Kitty Kelley [125]
Growing up, he and Anne had become close, especially after their royal tours of Australia and the United States, when they represented the Queen. On those trips, Anne, who seemed selfish and arrogant, made Charles look good. He was ingratiating; she was dismissive. He tolerated tedious questions from reporters; she refused. He smiled for photographers; she swatted them like nasty flies. “Bugger off,” she ordered, holding up her hand when cameras pressed too close. In Washington, D.C., Charles asked the Speaker of the House of Representatives why the bald eagle had been selected as the country’s national symbol. Anne crinkled her nose in disgust. “Most unfortunate choice, isn’t it?” she said.
“Anne was awful,” recalled the wife of the Assistant Chief of Protocol in the Nixon administration. “She did not speak to anyone. Charles was stupid but rather sweet. During their visit to the U.S. in 1970, Charles asked the British Ambassador, ‘Do the Catholics and the Protestants fight each other over here as much as they do in Britain?’ The Ambassador cringed with embarrassment.”
When Princess Anne was asked how it felt to have Buckingham Palace as a private property, she shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said, irritated by the question. “It’s not private property. The Palace belongs to the Crown.”
Charm eluded Anne, who didn’t stifle yawns when bored or pretend to be amused when she wasn’t. She had her father’s blast furnace personality and his “the only good reporter is a dead reporter” attitude toward the press. She was terse, tough, and unemotional, a far cry from her grandmother. The Queen Mother preferred the sweet, malleable Charles to his blunt sister, but Anne won the affection of her aunt, Margaret, who envied her independent spirit.
“Anne’s much more positive than I was,” said Princess Margaret, who understood the difficulty of growing up as royalty’s second child. “She’s much tougher, too, and has been brought up in a different atmosphere, and went to school.”
Charles, who valued his sister’s no-nonsense strength, was heartsick to lose her to marriage. “I can see I shall have to find myself a wife pretty rapidly,” he wrote to one friend, “otherwise I shall get left behind and feel very miserable!” To another he said: “Everyone is becoming engaged left, right and centre…. I am now becoming convinced that I shall soon be left floundering helplessly on a shelf somewhere, having missed everyone!”
Prone to melancholy, the Prince of Wales fell into a deep depression, which he acknowledged in long, self-pitying letters to friends. “I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,” he wrote. He kept to himself as much as he could on board ship and poured his distress into his diary.
To his shipmates he tried to appear jaunty about his sister’s engagement, but he could not conceal his resentment. “Anne couldn’t marry her horse, so she’s marrying Mark,” he said about his future brother-in-law, an accomplished equestrian in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. Years later the writer Auberon Waugh described Phillips as “Princess Anne’s grinning, speechless husband, who, if you whistle at him, wets himself.” Charles agreed and called him “Fog” because he was “so thick.”
The Duke of Edinburgh, whose letter to Charles had hinted at a mismatch between Anne and the army captain, had questioned his future son-in-law after the couple had been photographed kissing in public. The young officer professed honorable intentions toward the Princess, but Prince Philip cut him off.
“Balls,” Philip retorted. “I just hope there’s none of this premarital malarkey.”
The Palace tried to claim the kissing photograph was a fake. They officially denied there was any relationship between the Princess and Mark Phillips. In fact, they claimed that the couple did not know each other. “They’ve never met,” said the Queen’s press secretary. He then asked Robert Edwards, editor of the Sunday Mirror, to run a story ending speculation about a relationship between