A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a good friend and telling her about Tina Brown’s new book, “the Palace Papers,” that I was eager to read. She was, too; she talked about how much the Royal family meant to her, growing up in a strict Yankee household in Vermont.
She said she hoped to grow up and marry Prince Charles, and she told me she recently wrote a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace expressing her sorrow to the Queen, who she called “her Majesty,” upon the death of her consort, Prince Phillip.
She preserved the very polite response in plastic.
“I have the feeling your childhood might have been a little dark and dreary, “I said, and she nodded; yes, that was true. I was surprised by her love and interest in the royal family decades after her childhood.
And this was the most interesting thing to me about reading this book. It is full of juicy gossip, revelation, and barbed insights; hardly anyone escapes Tina Brown’s sharp observations – not the Queen, the media, the family.
But the most exciting thing about the Royal Family in England is that they still exist.
The members of the family seem like the rest of us to me; they say and do stupid things, want things they can’t have, struggle with obligations that are suffocating, sometimes cheat and lie, are snared in scandals, and make apparent blunders and work with life under a brutal telescope.
The attacks and cruelty and scrutiny their royalty bring them are sobering.
Yet here we are, a thousand years into the reign of Windsor, and me and many others – and my very sophisticated and intelligent friend – can’t wait to read about this family and the lives they lead.
Why is that?
In a way, Brown struggles with this question all through her book.
People seem to desperately need Kings and Queens and Princes and Princesses in their lives, distant and seemingly glamorous people leading glamorous lives, which very few of us get to do.
Who among us, after all, would mind being a Prince Or Princess and waving to cheering crowds from beautiful horse-drawn carriages while wearing medals and jewels on the way to Westminster Cathedral?
Brown has a sharp and unforgiving journalist’s eye.
She reminds us that these are flawed and ordinary people living lives about as glamorous most of the time as fish in restaurant aquariums. It looks beautiful outside but is an almost impossible mess inside the fishbowl.
My friend loves the Royal Family because it gave her a fantasy and dream in life that she couldn’t find as a child. And the pull has lasted her whole life.
I guess this must also be true of me, although I am not consciously aware of ever wishing to be a royal or marry one.
I know my childhood was harsh and grim and full of fantasies. I am susceptible to this one in my own guarded and skeptical way. Lots of romance and fantasy are born and bred in the minds of unhappy children.
In either case, it’s a challenging book to put down, revealing as much about all of us as it does about the family itself. Here in America, we are aching for a revered leader who is trusted, consistent, and committed unwaveringly to public service.
There, in England, they are struggling to live with one. But it is clear that Elizabeth is loved and admired more than any public figure in America for decades, if ever
At least, England has Queen Elizabeth, who has devoted every day of her life to being a perfect Queen in the service of her people. They will miss her.
She is something her people want and badly need, and whose equivalent America does not have. Fantasies about people struggle to survive in the modern era of intrusive, pervasive, and often cruel media and the collapse of anything resembling privacy.
Elizabeth has managed to pull it off, primarily by never showing a public emotion in nearly a century of reigning over a fractious and quarrelsome people. That is quite an accomplishment, all the more so given her dysfunctional and disaster-prone family. She is the Queen of self-control. Nobody ever really knows what she is thinking.
The book is long, 600 pages, and I was choking on the details, but I savored it and will miss reading it. It touches things in me as well.
For those who love every detail of life in the Royal Family, this is the book you are waiting for.
Tina Brown, one of the best-qualified people on earth to write it, writes about the inner workings of Buckingham Palace and the inner lives of the Royal Family and their lives, scandals, loves, and disappointments. She focuses on four royals, Diana, Camilla, Megan, Elizabeth, and Kate.
Brown is no gossip-monger.
She is a distinguished English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk show host, and author of the best-selling Diana Chronicles in 2007, by far the best book written on Diana, according to the critics.
She is a serious, organized, and unbelievably well-connected journalist who has worked in England and the United States.
Brown was born a British citizen and received her United States citizenship in 2005. She was editor-in-chief of Britain’s biting Tatler magazine at 25 in London. Before founding The Daily Beast, she edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker Magazine in America.
She is a writer I trust and pay attention to. This is her turf and she knows every inch of it or somebody who does.
She cares about truth and fairness, and her research is far beyond what almost any publisher would ask for. The acknowledgments alone could make a small book and read like a who’s in American and British journalism, culture, and high brow society.
Her new book, The Palace Paper, Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil, is entertaining and fascinating.
It more than delivers on its promise to detail the inner workings of the Windsors.
At 600 pages, it’s more detail about “The Firm,” as the Royal Family is called in England, than I cared to read, but the reporting is astonishing. When Meghan arrives, the book takes off.
Brown manages to skewer every family member except Camilla, Prince Charle’s long-suffering soon-to-be Queen Consort. If Elizabeth ever does die, Prince will be King, and Camilla, after years of difficulty, a Queen.
This tells me that Camilla, as well placed a person as one could find, was a valuable source. The Bob Woodward rule always applies in tell-all books – if you are left alone, you were a source.
The book begins with a review of the tragic life and death of Princess Diana and of the role Britain’s vicious and relentless tabloid press played in it. She writes about the powerful impact on the Royal Family, especially on her two sons, Princes William and Harry. I feel like I’ve been over this ground too many times. Brown adds a lot of new details to it, for those who care.
Diana’s death was the first time the world got to look deeply into the family and its secrets.
They didn’t come out looking good. They were revealed as the pompous and calcifying fuddy-duddies that they are. They got the shake-up they needed.
Diana was much more beloved even than the Queen. But Elizabeth had no context for understanding her.
A couple of hundred years ago, Elizabeth would have chopped off her head and been done with it, but Diana wielded the media like a sword and humiliated the family.
For me, the book really began to move halfway through when Megan Markle, an ambitious young B-level Hollywood TV, and film star, shows up in England looking for work, and a boyfriend who could help elevate her fame and rise above a mediocre film career.
A friend set her up to meet Harry. It was love at first sight, on both sides.
Like Diana, Markle was to shake up the Firm and change it.
Young feminist outsiders from America don’t play by the Firm’s rules; they give nasty interviews to British TV celebrities or their friend and neighbor in California, Oprah Winfrey. Their sword is media, not the Tower of London.
The details of this struggle in the book are surprising, shocking, and irresistible.
In many ways, the book is about women, and the different ways in which they seek and yield power, from Diana to Meghan to Camilla to Kate, the Queen to be, and Queen Elizabeth.
Meghan hit the Royal Family like a guided missile, as did Diana before her.
Troubled and perennially angry Harry, struggling to deal with the awful death of his mother, abruptly returned from dangerous combat duty in Afghanistan after his presence was outed by the press, and he was angry at just about everyone.
Their household staff hated both of them for their rudeness, bossiness, and demands.
Harry despised the journalists who stalked and dogged him and resented the increasingly good and middle-class life of his older brother William, the future king.
He seethed at the rules and restrictions of the stiff bureaucrats in the Palace Guard first in line to the throne after Charles, and he was lonely and unhappy.
Brown is somewhat sympathetic to Harry – his mother was killed in a devastating way – but not Meghan, who is depicted as a spoiled, demanding, rude, and ruthless brat. She sees him as wounded and vulnerable.
She was just what Harry was looking for, and vice versa. The two of them merged their anger and resentment and began almost immediately plotting against the family and for their celebrity and gobs of money.
For Meghan, it was her lifelong fantasy to be rich and powerful. For Harry, it was revenge.
To do that, they had to get away from the Queen and the restrictions she and a thousand years of precedence placed upon them.
They got away, but at a high cost to their reputations, dignity, and relationships within their families.
Like Brown, I left feeling poorly for Harry and disliking him and his wife. They set about doing what America does in America and began raking in millions and millions of money from deals and contracts.
In the book, the couple seemed calculating, greedy, endlessly spoiled and dramatic, whiny and surprising. They were brazenly manipulative, according to Brown.
Brown was much kinder to brother Kate and William, apart from suggesting they were wilfully dull.
Harry and Megan were pleased with their 100 million dollar Netflix production deal, their carefully planned interview with Oprah, and their 13 million dollar Mediterranean Mansion in Montecito, Calif., near their new pal Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to America.
The Royal Family’s focus on a life of community service does not seem high on the couple’s list.
One of the exciting things about the book to me was Brown’s writing about how Britain and America share little but a common language.
Megan’s strategy was an instant success in America; it fell flat in England. She could never adapt to the British way of doing things and didn’t want to. She won’t be going back too often.
The two countries are radically different from one another.
Brown’s book is thoughtful and insightful about more than the Royal Family, whose lives are exciting but which are almost uniformly dull. The job seems to d demand it, at least in public.
Because all the kids in the Royal Family are messed up living their ridiculously arcane and scripted lives, they are sitting targets for the tabloid press in England, tormenting and ridiculing them with skill and glee.
That doesn’t make their lives attractive or glamorous, not to them. The Queen has had some difficult years.
Camilla, the presumed future queen consort, is a divorcee with two children. Prince Harry left the family to protect his new wife, Meghan; his uncle Prince Andrew was stripped of his royal titles after his shockingly creepy involvement with an international sex-trafficking scandal. (I loved when Brown referred to Andrew as a “coroneted sleaze machine.)
Beyond that, all hovers the ghost of Diana, next to the Queen, the most famous and loved royal in modern history. The ripples of her life and death continue to roil the very idea of a monarchy, and the lives of her two sons, until recently thought to be the family’s future.
Brown goes well beyond palace intrigue. She takes a thorough and critical look at the media’s role in the successes and failures of Elizabeth’s reign. She portrays the Queen as faithful to her work and duty but a remote, cold, and bumbling parent.
As a grandmother, she tries hard to be loving and often caves in to her rebellious children and grandchildren when they ask for things they shouldn’t have – like the money they didn’t earn.
In her role as a Queen, she is ruthless and unyielding.
After trying to shield him, she did not hesitate to toss her favored son Andrew under the bus when he got caught playing with Jeffrey Epstein. She ordered him to get lost and never be seen in public again.
I also found Brown fascinating in detailing women’s challenges in being famous in a world still dominated by white men and judged by many different double standards.
When men are tough, they are heroes. When women are tough, they are scheming bitches. It’s one of the oldest stories in the world.
Donald Trump, as foolish and dishonest a public figure as ever lived, gets elected President of the United States. In England, Meghan is roasted alive and chased out of the country (as Diana was at times) for wanting to be too powerful.
Brown writes in great and riveting detail about the different choices women have to make to be loved and successful.
She contrasts Meghan and Harry with Harry and Kate, the future King and Queen.
Meghan is the new American woman, on the make, hungry for fame and money, unrelenting and demanding, and skilled in using social media to get famous by promoting her beauty, sexuality, and glamorous life.
When she got to London, she was insistent on openly looking for and finding a husband who could elevate her to global celebrity.
Meghan is biracial in a white world, here and there, and is angry about how the wider world treats her. Race played a significant role, says Brown, in her troubles.
Harry is mad about the same thing she is – her treatment – and has devoted much of his new life to protect her from what we call the media. Their estate in California is a fortress against the outside world. There are no happy pictures of their children, no happy photos outside of hospitals.
Kate, equally ambitious, chose a different path. She comes from upper-class stock and follows the conventions of upper-class England and The Firm. She does what she is expected to do, is beautiful and polite, and presents herself first and foremost as a mother and good wife.
She is, of course, more than that, as Brown reports. She is calculating in her own way, the British way.
William is quiet, shy, steady, and dutiful in the way of the Queen, who he is expected to succeed one day. Kate is beautiful, never controversial, never outspoken, and moves with a protected circle of socialite friends.
Kate uses Instagram differently than Megan; she takes photos of her children, they are always happy and beautiful, and she lives a spotless and traditional middle-class life as a mother and supporter of her husband.
The book reminds me that we follow these people’s lives all the time, but Brown reminds us that we have no idea what is going on behind those closed doors for all the chatter about social media and otherwise. Reading the book, I thought once more that I ought never to covet another person’s life.
Besides her penetrating writing about the media and women celebrities, Brown asks a question all of England and much of the world is asking?
Can the monarchy survive beyond the ailing Elizabeth?
She is the only monarch most Brits have known all of their lives. She is the rock of Gibraltar there, consistent, predictable, controlled, a very fixed point in an insanely turbulent universe.
Brown surprised me by guessing that things will be okay.
Prince Charles, the least popular royal, is set to become King at what is a good time for him. A lifelong environmentalist who was often ridiculed as being a wanker and a nut now looks prescient and wise.
He has studied climate change for decades and talks about it knowingly and well. It may be that this unhappy man, now happy for the first time since marrying Camilla, will become King at the right time.
He is a new and different Charles, with new and different ideas, says Brown.
His faithful parenting of Harry and William won him a lot of supporters, although now, he only communicates with Harry through their private secretaries and aides.
As portrayed by Brown, William seems much like Queen Elizabeth in many ways: quiet, reserved, and devoted to duty.
People have asked me why I am interested in reading this book at all?
Because it tells me so much about people, not just Kings and Queens, we seem to need a King or Queen in our lives, someone who is dependable and who shows up and isn’t tarred by political fanatics or partisans.
In America, the fact that there is no such grounding figure seems to leave a big hole in our public lives and discourse. We can only follow people on our left or our right. We can’t seem to find anyone to hold the middle ground.
Queen Elizabeth has little actual power anymore, yet she is one of the most loved and influential people on the earth, not just in England.
I think that’s really what Tina Brown’s juicy and revealing book is about. It tells me, at least, as much about me and us as it does about these tortured celebrities trying, like the rest of us, to get by.
I’d skip the book if you don’t care about the Royals.
If you do, this may be one of the best books you’ll ever get to read about the subject.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
I also enjoyed the book, and you have reviewed it well. I was more than amused to see that the Queen’s lady-in-waiting breaks in her new shoes for her.
Jon, I read the book, like you, I found it long and rather ‘daunting’ to read (Diana’s favourite word, I think). It was also at times, boring. The reporting and writing are good, no doubt about that. But, no amount of ambition or money would lead me to ever envy the life these people have been born to and like you I’ve wondered why people have been so intrigued by them. The Caribbean trip that William and Kate took, standing in the open car waving at the spectators, was to me, the ultimate slap to the islands Britain overtook. But as history tells us, more powerful countries all exploited lesser more vulnerable countries in those days. Thanks, that’s a great review. I donated my book to my local library. I’m going to forward your review as well to my librarian friend. To me, the monarchy is an anachronism, it’s lived beyond it’s time. It will be interesting to see how Charles transforms the concept of being born into a family where one can have one’s toothpaste put on one’s toothbrush by a ‘servant’ still.
Sandy Proudfoot, Canada, which is part of the British Empire still. Why?
Like your friend, I grew up in Massachusetts in the 60’s. One of my aunts had three large framed photos on her wall. Every time we visited I saw the Pope, President Kennedy and the Queen of England. Enough said.