Peter Bart: Pre-Woke Royals Reveled In Hollywood Naughtiness, But The William-And-Kate Show Ducks Family Rivalries
04.12.2022 - 21:19
/ deadline.com
Having just arrived in Los Angeles, Prince Philip faced a covey of reporters with photographers snapping away. “You asked about my mission to America,” he said. “The Queen and I are dedicated to helping the underprivileged. Mind you, we realize that an underprivileged child in Los Angeles is one who doesn’t have his own swimming pool.”
This was a jaunty, relaxed Prince Philip, circa 1966, unworried about the social media (there weren’t any) as he made his rounds of Hollywood. Joining him for meals and visits to sets were Natalie Wood, Shirley MacLaine, Dick Van Dyke, Gregory Peck and Joey Bishop, who, observing the Prince’s chain of jokes, said, “He’s so funny, I may run for Prince.”
The tension-packed forays of William and Kate this week, with their dire media overtones, seemed in sharp contrast to the loose, pre-woke royal expeditions of the ‘60s. While there was ample coverage of the couple’s meetings with President Biden and with random Kennedys, the background buzz was about racial slurs in London and the leak of a Meghan-and-Harry TV teaser highlighting their upcoming special.
Netflix has a giant advance to recoup, so royal gossips asked, ‘Did the company leak the teaser’? Or was it a snarky Meghan-and-Harry ploy to distract coverage from the ‘main event’ in Boston? In the teaser, Meghan acknowledges ambiguously that there’s “a lot at stake” in her book, podcast, and Netflix ventures, given ‘The Crown’s’ tough position on the couple’s independent status.
In Boston, meanwhile, the future king and his wife were scrupulously polite, if somewhat stiff, in their week’s packed schedule, which, for media veterans, posed a startling contrast to the Philip-and-Elizabeth II visits a generation earlier.
Youthful and