As I recover from no fewer than two Dazzling Royal Visits in the space of a single month, I am stricken with an inescapable conclusion:
Prince Charles is a man who should be king. Now.
Actually, only one of the Royal Visits was at all dazzling, the recent blitz of the Fun Apple by HRH Princess Di. Looking every inch the People magazine cover girl the gods intended her to be, she chatted with homeless children and embraced youngsters in a Harlem AIDS ward, but also somehow found time to go to a fashion show, an Upper East Side dinner party, an F.A.O. Schwarz toy promotion, an F.A.O Schwarz luncheon, an opera, two opera receptions, a gala formal dinner and three daytime receptions-all within 48 hours and all without her husband, though with several hundred of us newsies in tow for nearly every merciless minute of it.
Baring up in the cold
Actually, not every minute was merciless. For one thing, the Countess Barat provided us with her limousine to attend the opera portion of the visit. At the opera, Di wore a low-cut gown that bared the famous Royal Cleavage in incandescantly dazzling fashion, despite Truly Frosty subfreezing
temperatures. She also declined to wear a coat, though all the New York la-dee-da ladies in attendance huddled in furs like characters in ”Dr. Zhivago.”
The other Royal Visit, by Prince Charles, heir to the throne, etc., just a few days ago, wasn`t quite so dazzling. His Royal Nibs stopped in the Fun Apple for just one night, without his wife and without a single public occasion, not even a visit to a mucking toy store. Then he hit Washington as though on a secret mission, holing up in the British Embassy, except for once sneaking next door to visit Vice President Quayle at the Vice President`s House (where I think Quayle is being held in protective custody) and choppering up to Camp David for a quickie dinner with George and Bar Bush.
But I did get to hang around Charles a little at a British Embassy reception while he was here, and that`s where I came to my inescapable conclusion-one, I should note, that`s been nagging at me since I started following the Royals in 1977. Charles should be king-not upon his mother`s death, or on her reaching retirement age, or next year, but NOW.
A dud of a dignitary
Queen Elizabeth was marvelous as a little princess and a valiant wartime heroine of the Blitz, scuffing her patent-leathers in the actual bomb debris and all that. But as queen, she has been a Royal Dud, presiding not so incidentally over a swift evaporation of the British Empire that took Great-Great-Grandmum Victoria and her predecessors centuries of Wog-thrashing to amass.
Aside from empire-shrinking, her reign has stood for only two things:
horses-beasts whom she loves so much that she and all her family have come to resemble them-and frumpery, which she has transformed into a Royal religion.
(I think she`d have a hard time getting named ”best-dressed woman” in Hobart, Ind.)
Charles is quite something else. He`s not only the first British Royal actually to bother attending college and graduating, but the first one, I think, with the intellectual skills to manage it. He`s a damned decent chap, keen on sports and military things-a bloody helicopter pilot, for heaven`s sake-a doting father, a good sport, a four-goal polo player. (His father, Philip, just gallops behind all the other players, shouting and swearing, though I suppose that`s fun, too.)
Into the ozone
And, if not Dazzling, Charles is damned interested in things-conservation, farming, education, medicine, the problems of the
handicapped, music, history, archeology, architecture-so many things that I think the first book he read was the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. He`s even interested in the depletion of the ozone layer, so much so that, at an embassy luncheon during his visit here, he talked to Bryant Gumbel of the
”Today” show about it. I think Gumbel`s about as interested in ozone as Di is, and her primary interests are 1) her clothes and 2) Michael Jackson`s clothes. I think they have the same designer.
The queen, who will be a maid of 62 summers next month, has been on the throne for 36 years now. Poor Charles is 40 bloody years old and still without a real job. Queen Victoria hung on until she kicked at age 81. Her poor old son Edward VII didn`t get onto the throne until he was 59 and much too fat for it. He died of girlfriends, cigars and good liquor just nine years later.
I simply can`t envision Charles kicking from girlfriends and good liquor, but an overindulgence in conservation, farming, music, history and archeology will get to you.
Watch that Maggie
If Liz doesn`t get off the, er, throne and let Charles have it, she`s liable to be supplanted anyway. Not by him, but by the most imperious personage Britain has seen since Field Marshal Montgomery-Her Parliamentary Highness Margaret Thatcher. (I honestly feared the former grocer`s daughter was going to have some impudent questioners beheaded at her last news conference here.)
Not only has Thatcher made Britain`s trains run on time and its Jaguars work without daily garage visits, she`s started pushing all sorts of new throw-away-the-key criminal laws and publish-and-perish censorship laws-hence the scurrilous references to her in some quarters as Mussolini in drag. Having herself declared Empress of Britain, even though it would make her sound like a ship, is doubtless next on her agenda. (No wonder she hung onto the Falklands. They`re all that`s left.)
But if Charles, instead of the horselady, were on the throne, Margaret would have to think twice about such a promotion for herself. As stout-hearted a man as the prime minister is, it`s not as easy to push around a real king as it is a little old lady.
With Di and the Famed Cleavage on the throne beside Charles, who`d pay any attention to Margaret anyway? –
