Charles, Earl Spencer
Last week Britain lost a
princess and found a hero: Charles, Earl Spencer, the angriest brother in the
world. Spencer's vitriolic, anti-press, anti-monarchy eulogy was wildly popular
in the United Kingdom--it's been called "one of the most important speeches in
recent British history" and reprinted by all the vile tabloids it denounces.
(Spencer has invented a literary genre, the Attack Eulogy.) You might think
that Spencer's plummy accent, Hugh Grant-y good looks, and lordly manner--well,
he is a lord--would make Britons nostalgic for the good old days.
(Remember when toffs were really toffee?) But the earl is a very new, very
modern, and almost American kind of aristocrat. The stiff upper lip has been
replaced by the barbed, blabbing tongue; reticence by confession;
traditionalism by populism.
Spencer's
eulogy, which did as much to settle scores as to commemorate his sister, did
not surprise anyone who's followed the earl over the years. The 33-year-old
Spencer has nursed a grudge against the press since Diana's marriage to Prince
Charles interrupted his boisterous adolescence. Fame was thrust upon him, and
he didn't like it much.
In a normal aristocratic family, Spencer would have been
just another playboy. But he was the Princess of Wales' younger brother, so his
noble pursuits--i.e., wine, women, song--became tabloid fodder. His
escapades--Eton roughhousing, Oxford carousing, riotous birthday parties,
speeding tickets--made headlines. Fleet Street dubbed him "Champagne Charlie."
His many model-girlfriends decorated gossip columns, much to his annoyance. (Of
course, the models wouldn't have been his girlfriends if it hadn't been for the
earl's high profile.)
Spencer's
rage at the press has grown in recent years, and with much justification. In
1995, the News of the World publicized his wife's alcoholism and
anorexia (or, to use that excellent British phrase, "a slimming disease") and
snapped surreptitious pictures of her at a private treatment facility. When his
best friend committed jewel fraud, the Daily Express falsely accused
Spencer of abetting the criminal. Another paper falsely accused him of selling
black market tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet. A paparazzo in South Africa,
where Spencer has lived since 1995, sneaked into his home as a domestic worker
and photographed him. Spencer has fought back, repeatedly winning damages from
papers that intruded on or defamed him.
But, like the British public--which demands
more celebrity photos even as it shouts for journalists' blood--Earl Spencer
has a much more ambivalent (read: "hypocritical") relationship with the press
than he pretends to have. He uses the media as much as he is abused by it--a
trait he shared with Diana. A few months after he married, for example, Spencer
slept with an old girlfriend in Paris. She was preparing to sell her story to
the tabloids when Spencer pre-empted her. He confessed his adultery to a
sympathetic Daily Mail columnist, got his soft-pedaled version of the
story published, and escaped serious damage. (In the old days, this would have
been called . Today it is spin control.) On another occasion, Spencer went on a
talk show and discussed his sex fantasies--Roman orgies, if you're curious. The
earl has even practiced the very journalism he decries. For much of the last
decade, he has been a correspondent for NBC and British networks, covering
celebrities and the aristocracy. His first TV assignment--no joke--was to serve
up royal gossip for NBC at the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.
The earl takes an equally
modern--and practical--approach to his noble heritage. He's worth more than
$100 million, but most of the fortune is tied up in land and antiques. He needs
cash flow to maintain his 121-room mansion and 13,000-acre estate, and he's
been savvy about finding it. A few years ago, he raised $336,000 by auctioning
four of his lesser titles, including Lord of Wimbledon. The titles were purely
symbolic--they carry no land and no seat in the House of Lords--but the sale
nonetheless horrified traditionalists. He has hocked heirlooms to pay taxes,
rented his mansion out for conferences and banquets, proposed turning 500
wooded acres of his estate into a housing development, and leased the grounds
for concerts.
One of the most admired
lines in the earl's eulogy was his promise to Diana that the Spencer family
will do all it can to ensure that Princes William and Harry "are not simply
immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned." He
presents his royal nephews with an awkward choice: Charles the prince or
Charles the earl. One is hidebound, stiff, silent in the face of media
criticism. The other is entrepreneurial, telegenic, noisy, and restrained by no
tradition. One is Britain's past; the other is its present.
