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Old Time Notes
125 Years Ago, July 17, 1880 - Among new and novel money-making dodges is that of the German who relinquished his wife on receipt of twenty-five dollars and then sued her for bigamy.
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...Continued
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But does Rebecca Tyrrel's highly readable biography of Camilla Parker Bowles live up to its ambitious title? Well, not really. There is little here that could be called intimate, and even less that is new.
I enjoyed Tyrrel's punchy prose, which races us through Camilla's life and loves. She has a neat and perceptive turn of phrase: Camilla, she opines at one point, is a "cushion-plumping sex-motherer" to her spoiled and immature prince.
The author appears to have done her historical research, and tells us rather more than we could ever want to know about Camilla's ancestors. I was left bewildered by just who was bedding whom in the tangled tale of Camilla's architecture-loving grandfather and his four wives. The point, I presume, was to establish a lusty link between this "insatiable Lothario" and the granddaughter he spawned. The well-chronicled affair between another of Camilla's antecedents, Alice Keppel, and Edward VII makes an inevitable early appearance. It is hard to imagine that Camilla really did wander up to the young Prince Charles and declare: "My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers. So how about it?" But it has been written so often that it deserves to be true.
Extensive research, however, is no substitute for genuine access to your quarry. And it is clear that Tyrrel has had no more access to Camilla than the rest of us. Mrs Parker Bowles has vowed--in person to me--not to cultivate a relationship of any kind with individual journalists. And she has thus far remained true to her word. So those of us who write about her are mostly clutching at straws--surviving, like Rebecca Tyrrel, on snippets of information from a variety of sources, some of them rather dubious.
Just like royalty, Camilla is protected by a band of fiercely loyal, tight-lipped friends. If they talk to journalists at all, it is exclusively to sing her praises. She is variously described in this book as "nice-natured", "charismatic", "uncomplicated" and "robust and outgoing ... a terrific laugh". The author seeks to balance these views by repeating newspaper headlines and stories that have castigated her over the years as "an old haddock, a trout ... a marriage-breaking wicked witch of the West Country". But trotting out a catalogue of dusty old cuttings does not add up to writing an incisive portrait. I wanted to hear something new--something that would add to my knowledge of a woman I have occasionally met and frequently reported on--but who remains utterly discreet and largely silent.
People are always asking me: Why didn't Charles marry Camilla in the first place and then we wouldn't have got into this horrid muddle? The answer, as Tyrrel recalls, lies in Camilla's slightly racy past and was originally given by Lord Mountbatten: "A bedded can't be wedded." At least not to a prince. Army officers are a different kettle of fish, and we hear once again about Camilla's rather desperate campaign to net the dashing Andrew Parker Bowles. He was apparent]y busy bedding so many women that it was quite a challenge to find him alone--never mind marry him--which is something, Tyrrel tells us, that Camilla "really, really" wanted to do. He was serially unfaithful to her from the start. But there is no evidence that she ever strayed further than her prince.
Quoting liberally from other, equally scantily sourced biographies, the author regales us with the story of the day the hapless Camilla turned up unexpectedly at Andrew's flat and found him with yet another "leggy Sloane Ranger type". That, we are told, was the moment she decided that if she couldn't beat him, she would join him. "She looked around for a while and then she found the biggest catch of all." Melodramatic stuff indeed! But it is one writer quoting another who was quoting some anonymous source. Who knows whether it is true? Only Camilla--and she's not telling.
If the past has been told and retold with varying degrees of accuracy, the future is certainly tip for grabs. And Rebecca Tyrrel throws interesting light on the destiny of Charles and Camilla. Above all c]sc, she rightly reflects, Camilla is constant. Whether or not she and her prince are still deeply in love (she suspects they are), there is nothing they can do about it now. "They are locked together: someone has died, two boys have lost their mother, the monarchy has been threatened ... he can't dump her and she can't dump him." It is a shrewd analysis of the complicated web they have woven.
Jennie Bond was the BBC's royal correspondent from 1989-2003
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