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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Romance can get complicated for anyone, but it's become a nightmare for the world's crown princes.
Aug 31, 2001 | In the cult of celebrity worship, nothing ranks higher than royalty. Yet royalty's tradition and glamour often shield a murky reality that, as we learned from this summer's regicide in Nepal, can be more Columbine than Camelot. Royal marriages are the stuff of Franklin Mint and Bridal Mart dreams -- with higher-profile couplings like Charles and Diana or Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones immortalized in porcelain dishes and figurines. But behind every dream wedding, there are numerous near misses and crash landings.
A scan of recent royal relationship catastrophes reveals what a nightmare life has become for crown princes, the world's most eligible bachelors. For every wedding day special on network television, there seem to be dozens more varnish-removing exposés in the tabloids spotlighting every royal misstep -- be it sexual or financial -- which is making it downright difficult for the next in line for the throne to make it from "Will you marry me" to "I do." The torture starts almost from the first date. If the monarchs had their way, the poor princes would lead lonely, celibate lives or wind up with handpicked fiancies bred for the icy confines of proper royal life.
Royals have always been the subject of more interest than your average Ben Affleck or Julia Roberts on the fickle public's fascination scale. "We are totally obsessed with the way royals lead their lives and the way they marry," says Marco Houston, editor of Royalty magazine. "It must be very hard for a young prince to deal with the sexual and financial scrutiny."
Ever since the days when King Edward abdicated the throne in the name of love to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson, the world has absorbed tales of royal courtship, marriage and breakups with insatiable appetite. In the 1970s, the collapse of Princess Margaret's marriage to Anthony Armstrong-Jones captivated a global audience, as did the tragic deaths of Princess Grace of Monaco, in 1982, and Princess Diana in 1997.
Marco Houston's father, Bob, who founded Royalty and has observed media coverage of kings, queens and their spawn for decades, chalks it up to sleazier media tactics in a landscape where the likes of Rupert Murdoch rule. "There used to be a deference in the way the media covered the royals," he says. "Following the breakdown of the marriage of Charles and Diana, all bets were off. There's this feeding frenzy mentality that's become the modus operandi for tabloids. They are the voice of the people, which is crap. They only report on royal events these days when there's a smell of scandal hanging about the air. They don't even talk about the serious aspects of royalty anymore."
Instead, they feature articles on, say, Princess Diana's penchant for colonic irrigation or, more recently, the royal massacre in Nepal, which, according to most reports, was triggered by deranged Nepalese Crown Prince Dipendra's parents' refusal to permit him to marry the woman of his choice.
Longtime American expatriate Barbara Adams, a charismatic figure, 40-year resident of Kathmandu and an observer of the royal family, knows better than most how tangled royal relationships can get. She's no stranger to controversy herself -- Adams' affair with a Nepalese royal has long been rumored to have been the source material for Han Suyin's 1959 novel "The Mountain Is Young." Adams, now in her 60s, lives in Long Island, N.Y., and has observed the tragedy in Nepal with much interest. "It's been a terrible struggle for Prince Dipendra," she says. "They wanted to choose his wife, and they never would have been happy with who he had chosen."
But there was little scrutiny of Dipendra's relationship by the media. That's in stark contrast to his counterparts in Western Europe, where Holland's Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Norway's Crown Prince Haakon have been dragged across the coals on their way to the altar. These days, young princes are the hottest players in the sizzling royal reality soaps and it seems no prince can get the role right.
Before he became engaged, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, heir to the Dutch throne, was a playboy and a partier. He earned the moniker "Prince Pils" for his beer-swilling talents at the University of Leiden. Then Argentine aristocrat and Deutsche Bank executive Maxima Zorreguieta came along and tamed him. The glamorous brunette won the hearts of Queen Beatrix and her successor to rule the House of Orange. But when it was reported that Zorreguieta's father was connected to Argentina's oppressive Videla regime of the '70s and '80s -- a period when more than 30,000 dissidents were murdered or disappeared -- a near-constitutional crisis erupted in Holland, a country where Parliament must give the future king's fiancie its blessing.
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