Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (9 page)

It was Camilla’s boisterous sense of humor and utter lack of self-consciousness that made her a favorite of both sexes—but especially the boys. It also helped that the other girls did not feel threatened by Milla when it came to looks. “If she’d been very beautiful,” Redgrave said, “I imagine it would have been a different story.”

A lantern-jawed tomboy, Camilla nevertheless attracted more male interest than any girl at the school. Her secret: “She could talk to boys about things that interested them,” said Carolyn Benson, another Queen’s Gate alumna. “She was never a girls’ girl. She was always a boy’s girl.” By the time she graduated at sixteen, Camilla exuded what Benson called a “sexy confidence over men. She was quite a flirt.”

From Charles’s standpoint, what added vastly to Camilla’s appeal was her ingrained love of the country life. Whenever she could, Camilla fled home to The Laines, the Shand estate fifty miles south of London in rural East Sussex, to join her sister Annabel and brother Mark in their favorite family pastime—foxhunting. Sibling rivalry among the Shand children was intense, however. Remarkably, Mark Shand later admitted that when he was a child he “loathed Camilla with such passion”
that he tried to “murder her” by stabbing her in the neck with a penknife—which could have changed the course of history. Mark, who later became a noted playboy, travel writer, and conservationist, botched the job and ended up accidentally stabbing himself.

There was the requisite year at finishing schools in Geneva and Paris before Camilla returned to London to work briefly as a receptionist at a decorating firm—and collect the $l.5 million inheritance from a relation she barely knew. During this time, Camilla shared a flat in central London with two other aristocratic young women.

It quickly became apparent that, as a flatmate, Camilla was far from fastidious. Camilla’s room looked “like a bomb had gone off in it,” said her roommate Virginia Carrington, daughter of Lord Carrington. “As soon as she walked in the door, her coat and shoes and everything else hit the floor—and that’s where they stayed until someone else came to pick them up.” If Camilla was an unrepentant slob, it didn’t seem to bother the people around her. Camilla, explained Carrington, “was so sweet it was impossible to be angry with her. She was like a big, boisterous puppy.”

Besides, the real business at hand was landing a rich husband, which Camilla’s flatmates promptly did: Virginia Carrington bagged Camilla’s real estate tycoon uncle, Lord Aschcombe, and Jane Wyndham married Winston Churchill’s grandnephew, Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill.

Asked why she hadn’t been quite so fortunate, Camilla shot back: “I’m holding out for a king, like my great-grandmother did.”

THE NIGHT THEY WERE INTRODUCED
by Charles’s former lover, the Prince was instantly charmed by the toothy, somewhat rough-
around-the-edges country girl. Soon, Charles was bringing Camilla along on his trips to Broadlands. Not only did Mountbatten approve, but he made certain that Camilla was always given the Portico Room at Broadlands. “Now I don’t want you to get any ideas,” Charles joked with Camilla, “but this is the room where my parents spent their wedding night.”

Lord Mountbatten was thrilled with his grandnephew’s new paramour—although he cautioned Charles not to think of Camilla as anything more than a temporary diversion. According to his private secretary John Barrat, Mountbatten “knew that Camilla would make a perfect mistress for Charles until his granddaughter was of marriageable age.”

In the meantime, Charles and Camilla weren’t exactly hiding their relationship from the public. In the months before Charles began his naval career, they were photographed at nightclubs and restaurants throughout London, giving rise to speculation that Charles might soon pop the question.

“For the Prince, real life began with Camilla,” said Charles’s friend, Argentinean polo player Luis Basualdo. By the time Charles shipped out aboard the HMS
Minerva
on an eight-month tour of duty in the Caribbean in early 1973, he and Camilla were close enough to have pet names for each other: Fred and Gladys, after two characters played by Peter Sellers in Britain’s popular radio program
The Goon Show
.

They exchanged passionate letters for months, so when Charles learned of Camilla’s sudden engagement to Major Andrew Parker Bowles that spring, he was understandably shocked. Parker Bowles, a player on the Prince of Wales’s polo team, had dated Princess Anne and was considered a rising star in the elite Blues and Royals regiment. He wasn’t exactly a prince, but the
Parker Bowles family seat was Donnington Castle in Berkshire, and his father was a distant cousin and close friend of the Queen Mother. The Queen knew of the Parker Bowles family long before Camilla joined it; at fourteen, Andrew had been a page at her coronation. She also knew that Parker Bowles had a well-deserved reputation as an insatiable womanizer, and that he had bedded the wives of numerous peers.

The couple exchanged vows in the Guards Chapel near Buckingham Palace, with the Queen Mother (a longtime friend of the Parker Bowles family) and Parker Bowles’s onetime girlfriend Princess Anne among the guests (Princess Margaret skipped the ceremony but made the reception). “At the time Camilla had no illusions about marrying Charles,” Brooks-Baker said. “The most she hoped for was to continue as the royal mistress. But for that she had to be married, and Andrew Parker Bowles met all the requirements. Besides, from what I understand she was as besotted with Andrew as she was with Charles.”

Charles took it well. When Camilla gave birth to a son, Thomas Henry
Charles
, on December 8, 1974, the Prince agreed to be a godfather. As might have been expected, rumors flew that the boy was actually Charles’s son. While the remote possibility existed, the fact is that Charles was at sea off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand during the time Tom would have been conceived. (Four years later, Camilla would give birth to a daughter, Laura Rose.)

For the Prince of Wales, the rest of the decade was a blur of sexual activity. He romanced the tony likes of Georgina Russell, daughter of Great Britain’s ambassador to Spain; the Duke of Wellington’s daughter, Lady Jane Wellesley; Lady Tryon; Lady Victoria and Lady Caroline Percy, daughters of the Duke of Northumberland; Lady Cecil Kerr, daughter of the Marquis of
Lothian; Lady Leonora Grosvenor and Lady Jane Grosvenor, both sisters of the Duke of Westminster; Louise Astor, daughter of Lord Astor of Hever; Lady Charlotte Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland; Lady Camilla Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland; Lady Henrietta FitzRoy, daughter of the Duke of Grafton; Bettina Lindsay, daughter of Lord Balneil; Davina Sheffield, granddaughter of Lord McGowan; brewery heiress Sabrina Guinness (who had already had relationships with Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Rod Stewart, and David Bowie), and Fiona Watson, daughter of Lord Manton. Fiona distinguished herself from her rather staid fellow aristocrats by posing nude for
Penthouse
under an assumed name.

NOT ALL OF CHARLES’S WOMEN
were plucked from Britain’s upper classes. In 1974 he was so smitten with Laura Jo Watkins, the daughter of American Admiral James Watkins, that he invited her to his maiden speech in the House of Lords. For months he secretly dated the actress Susan George, best known for her turn opposite Dustin Hoffman in the film
Straw Dogs
.

Then there were the dozens of women introduced to him by friends like Luis Basualdo. Charles’s polo chum drove around the countryside picking up tenant farmers’ daughters—“some seventeen or younger, but I told them to tell Charles they were nineteen”—giving them one hundred pounds (the equivalent in 2015 to well over $1,500) and delivering them to the Prince at Lodsworth House, the Sussex estate owned by Basualdo’s father-in-law. One girl, who worked in a local butcher’s shop, “looked like she was fourteen but she was probably eighteen. Stunning,” Basualdo recalled, “a dead ringer for Mia Farrow.”

Basualdo would bring Charles as many as four girls at a time for the purpose of playing sex games at Lodsworth House. Although the Prince preferred that the girls not be drunk, Basualdo made certain they had had a few drinks before meeting him.

Prince Charles’s favorite nocturnal game was “Murder in the Dark,” with Basualdo playing the murderer, Charles the detective, and the girls the victims. Groping about with the lights off, Charles was supposed to pinch the girls in the nose to make them scream. Instead, he would “find a girl, pinch her somewhere naughty, and then start kissing her. It was dark, so he’d throw them on sofas and have sex with them, there and then.”

According to Basualdo, who was also Christina Onassis’s on-again, off-again lover, the two men “shared dozens of girls. Of course I asked some of them what he was like in bed. They would laugh and tell me he was good. I never heard any complaints.” Charles was worried that he might be caught with an underage girl, however, and asked Basualdo to bring him “society girls of twenty-one or twenty-two.”

One of these was a young Colombian socialite. Their tryst took place at Basualdo’s house in London’s swank Belgravia district. “They were so noisy,” he said. “The headboard was banging, banging—it woke up the rest of house. Next time I saw Charles he was apologetic but laughed.”

Most of these encounters continued to take place near the polo grounds in Sussex, in Lodsworth House. “We had a massive attic furnished with sofas and a big bed,” Basualdo said. “It became his bolthole. I said he could make as much noise as he wanted.” There, Charles would come in from playing polo and announce loudly: “Ahem, I’m just going upstairs to take a bath”—which, added Basualdo “was his euphemism for sneaking a lady upstairs.”

At one point, the Prince’s polo teammates, well aware of what he was up to after nearly every match, sneaked into the attic while he was making love to a girl. When he chased them out, they locked the attic door from the outside—trapping him inside. Charles pounded on the door for thirty minutes before Basualdo showed up to let him out. “Do not ever do that to me again,” he shouted. “Do you understand?”

One of his longest and least-known affairs began just weeks after he attended the christening of Tom Parker Bowles. “There was one girl who managed to remain very nearly anonymous,” said Stephen Barry, the prince’s longtime valet. “The Prince saw more of her than anyone realized. Her name was Janet Jenkins, and she was a Welsh girl living in Canada.”

Blonde, thirty-year-old Jenkins was in fact the receptionist at the British consulate in Montreal, and within hours of their first meeting they made love in her apartment while the Prince’s bodyguards stood outside in the hallway. During that and all subsequent encounters, Charles and Jenkins did not use birth control, and it remains unlikely that the Prince of Wales ever considered using contraception with any of his lovers. “Neither of us,” Jenkins conceded, “thought of using protection.” (Inevitably, this laissez-fair attitude toward birth control led to numerous unsubstantiated rumors of abortions and illegitimate children—including Janet’s son Jason, who was born on June 13, 1984, just nine months after one of Jenkins’s sexual encounters with the Prince of Wales. Jenkins, who listed her husband as the father on Jason’s birth certificate, denied that her son was the product of her affair with the future king.)

Over the years, Charles wrote a series of lengthy, torrid love letters to Jenkins, and rearranged his schedule on several occasions
so that he could fly to Montreal to be with her. “He always included official functions,” she later recalled, “so that no one suspected a thing.”

No one except Camilla, whose polo club chums kept her abreast of all the significant players in Charles’s love life. Another was Lady Sarah Spencer, who stuck by Charles even after he abandoned her in the middle of a date to make love to his Colombian bombshell.

At this point, Sarah’s younger sister also hovered in the wings. Lady Diana Spencer had just returned from a year at the exclusive Swiss boarding school Institut Alpin Videmanette when she met the Prince of Wales for the first time in a muddy field at Althorp, the Spencers’ thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Northamptonshire.

In the end, Charles unceremoniously dumped Sarah Spencer for socialite Cristabel Barria-Borsage. The Venezuelan beauty later claimed that in bed, Charles insisted on being called Arthur—as in King Arthur.

Throughout it all, “Gladys” was always just a phone call away from “Fred.” After he left the Royal Navy, Charles turned to Camilla—not the Queen—for advice on what to do with the rest of his life. Her Majesty had let it be known through channels that he might be appointed Governor-General of Australia, if that were to his liking.

Charles chafed at the notion of being his mother’s proxy Down Under. The job was essentially ceremonial, and he knew that he faced a lifetime of ribbon-cuttings and hospital walkabouts. Instead, Camilla urged the Prince to make his mark in the nonprofit world, lending his name to a wide range of charities that reflected his personal interests. The result was the Prince’s
Trust, which over the course of the next several decades would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a wide range of British charities.

Like his frugal mother, who told the chef at Buckingham Palace to reuse the lemon wedges that had not been squeezed at royal banquets, Charles also kept a close eye on his personal finances. For more than six hundred years, the Duchy of Cornwall—135,000 acres of farmland, forests, waterfront, and commercial property encompassing Cornwall and twenty-one other counties—had been generating tax-exempt revenue that flowed directly to the future monarch. In addition, Charles received the tax-free net income from the Duchy’s extensive investment portfolio. (By 2016, the yearly sum would exceed $45 million.)

In August 1979, Camilla comforted a weeping Charles when IRA terrorists blew up Lord Mountbatten’s fishing boat off the coast of Ireland, killing Mountbatten and two others, including Mountbatten’s fourteen-year-old grandson. Determined to keep his promise to his great-uncle, he proposed marriage to Mountbatten’s granddaughter Amanda Knatchbull after she turned twenty-one, only to have her reject him.