The royals - Kitty Kelley [224]
The day the transcript was published, reporters surrounded Camilla’s home. When she heard why they were there, she was stunned. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she said. “I must speak to my husband. He is on his way home.” She closed the door and took the phone off the hook.
“6 Min Love Tape Could Cost Charles Throne” shrieked the Sun, but the London Evening Standard asked, “So What’s Wrong with a King Who Can Talk Dirty?” Charles said he was “appalled” by the publication of his private conversation and called friends to apologize for embarrassing them. They deplored publication of a private conversation that was taped, duplicated, sold, and printed in transcript form. “You might argue Charles and Camilla deserve the embarrassment,” said his biographer Penny Junor, “but surely not their children.”
Already nine-year-old Wills had been reported fighting with classmates at school, where he shoved a boy’s head down the toilet. Deeply depressed by his parents’ quarreling, he locked himself in the bathroom for hours, and his grades slumped. His younger brother, Harry, was seen sneaking cigarettes at school. Both children sucked their thumbs and wet their beds. Thomas Parker Bowles, the teenage son of Camilla and Andrew, was arrested for possession of drugs. He was not threatened with suspension from Oxford because he was off campus when apprehended by police for possession of cannabis and ecstasy pills. To escape the gibes of students, he began calling himself Tom Bowles. He did not admit that his middle name was Charles in honor of his godfather, the Prince of Wales.
Although the tabloid press condemned Charles as a knave, he found compassion in unexpected quarters: Peter McKay wrote in the London Evening Standard that the six-minute phone call was “silly, touching and filthy… [but it] made me think better of Charles…. He comes out of it as a daft romantic, dying to leap under the duvet, fond of terrible sex jokes.” The novelist Fay Weldon said she thought the transcript was moving. “What it’s got to do with Charles being King I don’t know. My opinion of him goes up no end because it shows he has some proper emotions….”
But most of the country was disgusted, and the next time he appeared in public, he was booed. At an official engagement, a man in the crowd shouted: “Have you no shame?” Opinion polls showed that only one in three Britons felt Charles was entitled to become King. Uncharacteristically, the English treated him like a politician, who could be deprived of his position because of his negative image. His friend and former equerry, Nicholas Soames, hastened to spell out the hereditary principle involved in succession. He explained that Charles’s right to the throne did not depend on his popularity: barring abdication or an act of Parliament, Charles was not disposable. “The throne is his duty, his obligation, his destiny,” said Soames. “It’s not something he seeks, but it will be his…. Twelve hundred years of British history are not going to be overturned by Mr. Murdoch’s republican press, engaged in a circulation war. The heir to the throne will be the next King, and that’s all there is to it.”
Another close friend said: “It was a terrible moment, the worst moment of his life…. He wanted to be taken seriously. He sincerely believed he had important things to say. And in six minutes of private conversation, a conversation that was nobody’s business but his and the woman to whom he was speaking, his reputation was ruined…. He really didn’t deserve to be destroyed so publicly and so cruelly.”
Even the far-off Fiji Islands were upset. The government announced it would discontinue celebrating Charles’s birthday as a national holiday because he no longer represented greatness to them. In Australia the Prime Minister