Shock! Horror! A teenage boy finds leggy blondes attractive! He has been known to smoke the odd cigarette or two! He suffers from hangovers after boisterous parties! He loves cars and wants a motorcycle! He hasn’t decided what he wants to do when he grows up!
The parents of most 19-year-old boys would be breathing a sigh of relief — “Phew, is that all?” But when the 19-year-old boy is second in line to the British throne, even the most commonplace of pleasures becomes whipped up into a frenzy of tabloid headlines.
Last week, Britain’s Prince William found his life the subject of intense media speculation once more with the publication of a much-disputed book, “Diana’s Boys: William and Harry and the Mother They Loved.”
Among other things, the book portrays the young prince as a “one-man wrecking crew” among the girls. “Is Playboy Prince a Sex Machine?” screamed the tabloids, recalling for some early stories about his uncle Prince Andrew and — difficult as it may be to believe now — his own father.
Even the news that Diana’s butler had been arrested for theft, and that Queen Elizabeth is reported to be warming to the idea of a marriage between Prince Charles and his sweetheart, Camilla Parker Bowles, couldn’t compete with new and juicy gossip about William and his brother, Harry, 16.
Gossipy `tribute’
Author Christopher Andersen names William’s closest girlfriends as glamorous English aristocrats Davina Duckworth-Chad and Emilia “Milly” d’Erlanger, and claims the prince has at the same time been enjoying a “steamy” e-mail correspondence with model and presidential niece Lauren Bush. (She denied this to The Washington Post in May.) Andersen claims there was plenty of “bed-hopping” in William’s year off before college, when he visited Chile on behalf of the charity Raleigh International.
Spokesmen for the royal family reacted quickly, dismissing the claims as “utterly contemptible” and “ludicrous allegations.” Andersen himself says the newspapers have blown it all out of proportion, and says he sees his book as a “tribute” to the boys and their mother.
So, fact or fantasy? The one thing we can be sure about is that since his mother’s death four years ago, His Royal Highness Prince William Arthur Philip Louis — or “Will Wales,” as he has chosen to be known until he completes his education — has tried to tell us as little as possible about his life.
The British media have abided by a gentleman’s agreement to stay away from William and Harry while they finish their schooling. But now that William is due to start undergraduate studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, that protection may dissipate.
Andersen’s book, published in New York by William Morrow, isn’t for sale in the United Kingdom, but quotes from it — and the palace reaction — have been published by media in Britain and elsewhere.
“There is an enormous fascination with William and Harry in America,” said royal historian and biographer Robert Lacey. “It’s thought of as on a parallel with John F. Kennedy Jr., but in fact it’s even more than that. It’s as if Marilyn Monroe had had children.”
Interest in the young man whom unauthorized royal biographer Kitty Kelley has dubbed “half movie star, half rock star and . . . probably the saving grace of the monarchy” is currently at fever pitch. When it was announced that he was going to St Andrews, admission applications rose by 44 percent — 90 percent of the increase accounted for by young women.
A `splendid achievement’
William and Harry, Diana once said, “are my one splendid achievement.” The poignant sight of the two princes bravely walking behind their mother’s coffin moved many. There were fears about what would happen to the two, who had lived most of their lives in the all-out verbal warfare that was their parents’ failed marriage.
At 9, William was passing tissues under the bathroom door to soothe his sobbing mother; when Harry was 9, his father went on national television to discuss his infidelity with longtime mistress Parker Bowles. Diana was revealed as a bulimic self-harmer who had had affairs herself; Charles coldly shut himself away from his wife’s grief. Royal-watchers speculated that it would be a surprise if the boys turned out even halfway normal, coming from a family that one journalist called “the maddest since the Munsters.” And all that was before their mother’s life was tragically cut short.
Four years later, Andersen’s book and other press reports make the princes sound far more than halfway normal (with the proviso that these, like most “inside” revelations from the palace, are basically uncheckable). They are close to their father and have accepted his relationship with Parker Bowles. William and Harry are devoted to each other, even if Harry is determined to outdo his older brother on the ski slope and polo field.
Of course, there are the inevitable rumors about William’s love life. Andersen claims that in Chile, more than once “William’s bodyguards reportedly looked the other way while he was locked in a passionate embrace with a female volunteer.”
Kelley, appearing on “Larry King Live,” summed up what many might have felt when she retorted: “Christopher, I think you’d have a worldwide exclusive if you told us that this glorious-looking young man joined a celibate Benedictine [monastery].”
Not that there haven’t been more serious risks. Five high-profile aristocrats in William’s circle have been caught taking drugs — among them Tom Parker Bowles (Camilla’s son) and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson (the daughter of close friends of Charles) — but there’s no suggestion William has used drugs. The worst that’s been said is that he had a massive hangover after one New Year’s Eve and that he apparently smokes, a habit that Andersen speculates would have enraged his mother.
Andersen also claims that in the last year William has been at the center of as many as 20 security scares involving such terrorist groups as the Real IRA, a radical offshoot of the Irish Republican Army.
But, said Lacey — author of “Royal: The Lives of the House of Windsor,” to be published next year to commemorate the queen’s Golden Jubilee — for all the tales of nightclubs and wild living, the real William is very different. A military career is by far the most realistic option, he believes.
A very traditional guy
“He’s a very traditional kind of guy,” Lacey said. “It’s often forgotten that he began his gap year [between high school and college] with the Welsh Guards in Belize. He likes that sort of thing. And the army would give him the privacy he wants.”
Andersen reports that William told one volunteer: “I rather like American girls. . . . I can easily see myself marrying one.” But most royal-watchers in Britain say he’s far more likely to stick with “his own sort” — aristocrats he has known for years — terrified as he is that he could be set up by the press.
“My own particular reading of the situation is that the queen and Prince Charles are very permissive,” Lacey said, “and that the boys have responded to that by taking on the traditional aspects of the royal family, happy to take on their duties and at ease with their destiny.”
Andersen calls this being “Windsorized” — Diana’s achievement being unacknowledged, much as her Spencer relatives have been cut off from the boys. “There has been an effort by the royal family to airbrush Diana out of the picture,” he said.
William’s humanitarian work in Chile, however, suggests that the training for public life that Diana began has had an influence. “Diana’s legacy lives on in the boys,” said Andersen. “But they are also her final revenge in the war of the Windsors. They are still her boys.”
Private lives in public
Lacey said that “here in Britain we must try very hard not to place these ordinary human beings with all the weight of expectations that were placed in Charles and Diana, which they both disappointed.” William and Harry “are sensitive young men, they are trying to lead private lives. And I don’t think that spreading who they may be going out with . . . is good for them.”
Others, like Andersen, disagree, saying that media reports about the princes are necessary and inevitable: They are, after all, public figures, second and third in line to the throne.
“I think it is doing [the princes] a disservice to have this wall between the public and the boys,” Andersen said. “Diana understood this; she wanted them to be like John Kennedy Jr. and embrace the media with humor, style and grace. . . . William needs practice; he cannot expect to be left alone. Just as his mother was the most celebrated woman in her time, he is going to be one of the most celebrated figures of the 21st Century.”
