The Late-Blooming Prince

Even aristocrats aren't like Charles anymore. The 40-year-old Earl of Albemarle, a six-foot hunk with a Battle of Agincourt beard, showed up at India House with the late press baron Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine, talking all about "branding" a shirt company he's started. "What's so different about your shirts?" I asked. "They're expensive," he replied. Being flash, being a self-promoter, is a style option now for the aristocracy as long as it's done with a self-protective wink.

Charles, who was essentially raised by his grandmother the Queen Mother, has an earnest sensibility more attuned to Grandma's era. His lack of irony about his hobbyhorses opens him to ridicule, but it also makes him, dare one say it, a better person.

In Kroft's pre-interview research for "60 Minutes," he found that American women he spoke to unfailingly raised the response Prince Charles made to the question "Are you in love?" on the day of his engagement to the Princess of Wales: "Whatever love is" -- a killing caveat that would haunt his Google life forever.

But was that line really a window on a chilly soul -- or just that old reflexive upper-class instinct that quickly moves to negate any show of messy feeling, part of the whole vocabulary of British detumescence you learn at boarding school, along with the sense that "trying too hard" is the worst thing you can do? Self-deprecation is Charles's mode of expression, and it's never served him well over here.

While the New York Post trashed the unfortunate balcony-bosomed, midnight blue velvet number Camilla wore to Tuesday night's reception at the Museum of Modern Art, the newspaper's columnist Andrea Peyser yelled at Charles for never touching Camilla once. But that's because we're all used to a red-carpet culture of Demi Moore's hand on Ashton Kutcher's butt -- as opposed to the tender restraint that prefers its intimacy in private, or a public couple trained to interact with the guests rather than each other when they're "on" for the night.

While Charles jousted effortlessly with Yoko Ono's extraterrestrial headgear, Camilla expended energy on oxygen-eating Park Avenue matrons who body-checked any reticent worthies who tried to join the conversation.

"Now everyone can see how wonderful she is," the prince told me quietly as his wife plunged through the sea of sharp elbows of the museum's drafty atrium. One of Camilla's feats is that she understands Prince Charles's language and simultaneously translates its meaning, which is often the opposite of what he says. Perhaps that's the definition of love -- whatever that is.

2005Tina Brown