The royals - Kitty Kelley [237]
The Queen had insisted on an advance viewing. She worried about what Charles would say on television, especially after his comment weeks before, citing the Scandinavian monarchies as “grander, more pompous, more hard to approach than we are.” Now she watched the two-and-a-half-hour documentary without much comment. She shot the equerry a look when Charles recommended hiring out Britain’s army to other countries like rent-a-cops. She raised her eyebrows when he complained about his staff’s overworking him, and she sighed when he bad-mouthed her staff. “They drive me bonkers,” Charles said of the Queen’s courtiers.
Philip reportedly exploded when he saw the documentary. “Oh, God,” he said, listening to the interview. He muttered something about his son’s brain being sucked dry. Then he added caustically, “Maybe he’s the ‘missing link.’ ” Philip’s comment referred to the unresolved mystery of the Piltdown Man, supposed to be the unknown connection between humans and apes.
“It would not have been appropriate then,” said a man in the room, “to repeat to the Duke what he had once said: ‘Every generation gets precisely the younger generation it deserves.’ ” The man was accustomed to Philip’s outbursts. By way of defense, he said, “There’s a saying that when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
The Queen was heard to say that she thought the interview had been “ill-advised.” She appeared to disapprove of Charles’s redefining the monarch’s role as “Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the Faith.” Charles had said that omitting “the” would embrace all religions, not simply Anglicans. “I belong to a hereditary monarchy,” he said. “I understand the parameters, but I’m prepared to push it now and then because I feel strongly about things.” His mother, who had forbidden him to attend the Pope’s Mass during a visit to Rome, was not comfortable with her son’s idiosyncratic attitude toward the Church of England. His father was convinced that his forty-five-year-old son had just set the record for stupidity.
The Palace did not comment on the interview, but almost everyone else did. Time headlined it as “Charles’s Cheatin’ Heart.” And Newsweek reported it as “a bad heir day.” Newsweek also characterized the documentary as “bad sex: painfully tedious foreplay followed by a lightning-quick climax.” The Daily Mail headlined its story “Charles: When I Was Unfaithful,” while the Sun said, “Di Told You So.” One cartoonist drew the Prince of Wales in bed, grinning foolishly with his crown askew. Sitting between two women, he had his arms wrapped around both. The caption: “The Lyin’ King.” Another cartoon showed him standing before two stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments: he was scratching out the Sixth Commandment—”Thou Shalt Not Commit (nor admit) Adultery.”
The Queen’s former private secretary sighed. “In time it will fade,” Martin, Lord Charteris told writer Noreen Taylor. “People will forgive. There is an awful lot to be said for honesty.” The courtier added sadly that this wasn’t the first time the monarchy had gone through troubled times. “But the Queen is enough of a realist,” he said, “to know there is nothing but to sit it out.”
Sitting was her specialty. So she sat for weeks, dreading the biography that was to follow her son’s television interview. Unfortunately the book was published on the eve of her departure for Russia. This was the first trip by a British monarch to that country since Edward VII had visited in 1908. Ten years after that, when the Queen’s grandfather George V declined to send the navy to save his cousins,