The Job Doesn’t Match Image in a Royal Fantasy

Trust me: If you’ve ever fantasized about leading the Life of Royally, a week here at close quarters with the Flying Yorks, Andrew and Sarah, would have cured you.

Forget the jewels (St. Edward’s crown weighs more than a crash helmet, and there’s no chin strap). Forget the crowds squealing your name (or some tacky boarding-school moniker). Forget, if you can, all that money (it has your mother’s or your mother-in-law’s face on it).

Be honest here. In exchange for never having to worry about mortgage payments (“Queen Victoria took care of all that , my good man”), never having to go through a metal detector (“Darn these tiaras; they always set that thing off”), never having to show ID anywhere, would you really enjoy:

Having your schedule set in concrete months in advance, unable to say on the spur of the moment, “Hey, let’s call in sick today and hit the beach.”

Knowing that utter strangers feel free to snipe about your clothes or your bald spot or whether you and your spouse share a bedroom, and fearing that the catsup stain on your blouse will show up in freeze-frame on the nightly news?

Having to look engrossed while inspecting grommets or admiring somebody’s rendering of “The Blue Boy” made entirely out of pastel Charmin?

I gather you’re not exactly wringing out your hankies at this point.

OK, take the Duke and Duchess of York.

Now, when most of us visit L.A., we go to Universal Studios, maybe the Venice boardwalk. Andrew and Sarah came to work, which meant inspecting endless British goods and art (the same stuff they see in their closets and on their walls at home) so Americans will buy the goods for their closets and walls.

In exchange, true, they had it pretty good. The monarchs of Hollywood bowed to them. They slept on their own boat, and they didn’t have to row. Even when they went to a grocery store, the stuff was perfect: grapefruit the size of bowling balls, the kind of food you’d photograph for propaganda leaflets to drop behind the Iron Curtain.

But their job struck Jack Lemmon as “like acting in a way. . . . The difference is they are doing the same scene over and over and over again, and they’ve got to remain fresh.”

Burst your bubble yet?

Then try this: there is no equal opportunity hiring for the royal family, unless you marry into it, and no way out except dying--or abdicating, which is like dying except people bad-mouth you after you’re gone. A friend of Prince Charles’ called it a “prison of privilege,” a gilded cage, but still a cage.

Take Charles, whose job is basically to be ready to be king. No downtrodden existentialist has ever been more limited by circumstance. Even as king, he must master the fine and frustrating art of indirection. He can’t even vote. That there have been fools and brutes born to be king is somehow less tragic than having someone bright, caring--and circumscribed.

I’ve covered a lot of royal visits; the press is a needed adjunct to them. Once, when the queen planned a visit in Africa, the ruler thought he would do her a favor, and banned the press. Word came from the palace--no press, no queen. They all went.

Covering the royals is like skiing on a crowded weekend--an hour in a lift-line for a five-minute downhill run. You wait in a “pre-position pool” for 45 minutes or more to observe the royals do their thing for a couple of moments, then you move ahead to wait, then watch them do something else for a minute or two.

This time, I found myself scouting the crowd, too.

People were thrilled to see them. Why? What’s the allure? They don’t have their own talk shows, they’re not often gorgeous, they don’t sing or play football brilliantly, they haven’t even killed a lot of people--some of the usual criteria for celebrity.

Is it just Pavlovian--anyone who appears regularly in People magazine qualifies? Is their fame contagious? Is it, as one woman said, oblivious to irony, that they look “so all-American?”

Perhaps it’s genetic, a fascination so far beyond historical as to be anthropological. Democracy is very new, and kingship is very old.

Perhaps it’s because there is ostensibly a family--the royal family--at the top of the official British heap, not just politicians and bureaucrats. And it’s been the same family, through a few Mendelian close calls, for nearly 1,000 years. The queen has been queen for 36 years. Al Gore wants to be President, and he has barely been alive for 36 years.

But as loony as democracy can be, I have yet to find anyone here--even those shrieking for “Fergie--” who would rather be called “subject” than “citizen.”

An old friend, now dead, played in a bagpipe band that wore for its kilts Royal Stewart, the queen’s personal tartan.

Dougie was part Comanche, part Scots, and all American. At one performance, an indignant old lady came up and scolded him. Where do you get the right, she demanded in a fury. Who gave you permission to wear that tartan?

Dougie smiled. Gen. George Washington, he said. At Yorktown.