Lovers 'forever'
2005-04-08 12:44
London - It's hardly been the stuff of fairy tales, but the messy, decades-long romance of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles is founded on something more solid than glamour or royal pomp.
By all accounts, the two - both of whom have endured a failed marriage and years of heartache and public humiliation - share an abiding love. Their wedding on Saturday makes official a relationship that began when the fifty-somethings were in their early 20s and has been through a thoroughly modern series of ups and downs.
Why Parker Bowles, then Camilla Shand, married another man after her initial courtship with Charles more than 30 years ago remains the central mystery of the relationship, and is largely the cause of the twisting, bittersweet course it's taken.
The prince's enduring affection for Parker Bowles helped poison his marriage to Princess Diana, who despised her husband's close friend and blamed her for the royal union's collapse.
Media-shy and down to earth, Parker Bowles couldn't be more different from the glamorous, volatile Diana, and she clicked with Charles in a way the princess never did.
Camilla's 'saucy' side
She displayed her saucy, irreverent side from the start, quickly winning the affection of a man who'd spent his life in a world of strict protocol and duty.
"My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress, so how about it?" Parker Bowles reportedly cracked when the pair first met at a polo match in the early 1970s, referring to a relationship between her ancestor Alice Keppel and Charles' forebear King Edward VII. Lucia Santa Cruz, a college friend of Charles, introduced them.
"They love the same things. They love the countryside and they adore dogs," novelist Jilly Cooper, a friend of the couple, told Britain's ITV television network.
Unlike the hugely popular Diana, Parker Bowles is viewed with disdain or indifference by much of the British public. While Diana was known for her emotional highs and lows, Parker Bowles is said to be a source of steadiness and support in her future husband's life.
The two share a love of hunting and other outdoor sports and reportedly felt a bond almost as soon as they met. For years, both have spent much of their time in rural Gloucestershire, socialising in a rustic crowd that Diana disliked.
Charles was immediately taken with the young Camilla Shand's lack of vanity, indifference to fashion and earthy sense of humour, journalist Jonathan Dimbleby reported in his 1994 biography of the prince, which he based on extensive interviews with Charles and access to his personal papers.
"The royal family are still surrounded by people who are extremely deferential in their presence and on occasion they like to come across somebody who's more natural... somebody they can relate to on a more personal level," said Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty magazine.
The couple spent much of their time together, but made no commitment before Charles left in 1972 for a long-planned eight-month voyage as an officer on a Royal Navy vessel. Dimbleby wrote that the prince, then in his early 20s, was not yet ready to consider marriage and was too emotionally reticent to tell Parker Bowles how strongly he felt for her.
While Charles was gone, the woman he had fallen for married the handsome Andrew Parker Bowles, with whom she had had an on-and-off relationship.
"I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually," Charles wrote after hearing the news, Dimbleby reported.
Catherine Brooks-Baker, a commentator on royal affairs, said Parker Bowles probably presumed Charles wouldn't see her as an appropriate wife because her background wasn't refined enough.
"She thought 'He's royal and I'll never be able to marry him,"' Brooks-Baker said.
The two stayed close; Charles later described Parker Bowles as his "touchstone" and "sounding board" and became godfather to her son Tom.
Parker Bowles reportedly encouraged her old friend to wed the vivacious young Diana Spencer, whom he met in 1977 and married four years later.
The prince, under intense media scrutiny and pressure from his family to find a wife suited to be queen, saw Diana - with her beauty and aristocratic breeding - as a perfect match.
But the marriage was troubled from early on.
Parker Bowles, 'the Rottweiler'
Diana was convinced that Charles was cheating on her and was still in love with Parker Bowles, whom the princess nicknamed "the Rottweiler".
Dimbleby's account said Charles cut off almost all contact with Parker Bowles for the first five years of his marriage. The prince said in 1994 he had only been unfaithful after the marriage had "irretrievably broken down".
At that time, Charles would go no further than characterise Parker Bowles as "a great friend of mine - and I have a large number of friends."
Diana saw it differently.
"There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded," she said in a 1995 television interview, three years after her separation from Charles.
One recent biography of the prince claims that he and Parker Bowles resumed their intimate relationship in 1984, shortly after the birth of his second son, Prince Harry. Dimbleby dates it to a year or two later.
Diana's affair with James Hewitt, which she acknowledged in her TV interview, began in 1986, according to his autobiography. After Hewitt, she was involved with a series of men, according to her former butler, Paul Burrell.
The prince's infidelity became painfully public around the time of his separation from Diana, when a transcript of a tape purported to be of a private telephone conversation between Charles and Parker Bowles was published.
The sexual intimacy and emotional bond between the couple was apparent. "Oh, God. I'll just live inside your trousers or something," Charles allegedly said.
Charles finds Cam 'exciting'
"Charles clearly finds her very exciting," Cooper said.
"When they are together they're very sweet. They're not overtly grabbing each other, but they look terribly happy in each other's company. Obviously, there is a very strong sexual pull."
Parker Bowles was widely vilified as the woman who had wooed Charles away from Diana. As the details of their extramarital affair became public, Britons' anger grew so strong that shoppers once pelted her with rolls in a supermarket.
After Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, he and Parker Bowles, who divorced her husband a year earlier, began slowly making their relationship public, hoping to win acceptance.
That effort was put on hold after the princess died in a 1997 car crash but eventually resumed, step by excruciatingly slow step.
Parker Bowles hosted a 50th birthday party for Charles in 1998 and the two made their first public appearance together after a gala at the Ritz hotel in London in 1999. That year she also met her companion's sons William and Harry for the first time.
Charles' mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who had long resisted acknowledging the relationship because it had been adulterous, signalled her acceptance in 2000 by chatting with Parker Bowles at a private party. In 2001, Charles kissed his long-time love on the cheek before cameras at a National Osteoporosis Society reception.
The effort culminated with the February announcement that the couple - he now 56, she 57 - planned to wed.
Their promise that they did not intend for Parker Bowles to become queen when Charles accedes to the throne seemed an acknowledgment that the public will never embrace her the way it did Diana.
- AP