Royal Pain: The British royal family is bracing for impact when Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir, … [+]
The first rumors that Prince Harry might be wanting to tone down some of his recollections in his $20-million as-told-to autobiography, Spare, surfaced in the publishing lunchrooms of Manhattan last summer, after Harry returned from the April funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip. It was at that ceremony in Windsor that Harry came face to face with his immediate family and his larger, extended family, seeing many of them for the first time since the announcement of his upcoming memoir, and since he and Meghan Markle sat for their sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey in the CBS /global broadcasting event in March 2021.
His grandfather’s funeral would ordinarily be an occasion for the Windsors to come together to celebrate a long, well-lived life and to invite the nation to do so. But the event was the opposite of that for the prodigal prince. He soldiered through it, and, though he was seen speaking with members of his family, not a lot of them really knew what they should do with him. There was a distinct distance maintained and a chill put up that most of them kept. His sister-in-law, Kate, made a notable effort to include him, and Harry and Prince William walked up the hill after the service together. But what Harry confronted, three years after moving to Canada and then to the United States, was that his strivings in Hollywood, on television, on podcasts, in speeches and in print, had had an all-too-real effect back home. The publication of Spare is part of that.
The title of the book is simple, quite blunt, and carries gravitas precisely because it deftly exploits the old rhymed cliche “an heir and a spare.” It’s the British polity’s wry gift to the language, rooted in Cockney rhyming-slang, in assessment of their monarch’s breeding duties to ensure the stability of succession. Suffice it to say, Charles and Diana gave Britain the exact fulfillment of the cliche’s requirements. Prince Harry would likely have himself joked about and/or been robustly teased with the designation across decades, at Eton, at Sandhurst, in the Army, wherever his crew of blokes would have wanted to rag him.
But whether or not he came up with the idea of using it in this instance, the act of taking on the cutting derogation as his book title is Harry’s own move. It’s a bold one, and it dovetails nicely with what we know of the straight-spoken combat chopper pilot and his two tours in Afghanistan. The prince’s use of the word opens a cosmos of connotations, bringing weaponly swagger as well as going straight into Harry’s role as an outsider in the monarchy. There’s power in that level of ownership; this usage shows that Prince Harry recognizes it. Not least, the title makes deft literary and enormous marketing sense. You want a tome on the royal family from an outsider who gives his book such a name. There could be no better or simpler flag to get the browsing masses to ask themselves this book-buying question: What could lie between the covers of that?
Seven thousand miles east of Montecito, California, the proud use of the word as a derogatory noun—along with a few other words describing the book’s narrative in the promotional jacket copy, notably, the participle “unflinching”—will have caused some concern in Buckingham Palace about what’s between the endpapers. To say that King Charles, Prince William, and/or their senior courtiers have been “dreading” the book is arguably an overstatement, with the possible exception of those courtiers whose direct mandates include spinning webs of positivity around any negative anecdotal flotsam coming off the book’s reviews or its publication date of January 10, 2023. Those courtiers would be well within their rights to dread the first few weeks of the British press using the tome as a piñata. But Charles, and the lone heir in the cliche that the book’s title so eloquently evokes, William, have a kingdom to run and with it, more productive things to do than worry about how they’re being portrayed by Harry. Harry has given Charles, particularly, a few solid years of practice—and Charles can take it.
That’s not to say that the memoir won’t have impact. Spare will make an enormous splash, first, across America and the 54 countries of the Commonwealth, and secondly on the Continent, some of whose royal families are related to the Windsors, and whose people still look to the British royals as the preeminent noble family in Europe. Harry is particularly beloved in Europe for his Invictus Games in service of wounded military veterans, the next installment of which will be held in Düsseldorf, Germany, a few months after his book drops.
Naturally, the book’s coverage will be global, and varied. We can look forward to much of the same breathless television prancing that attends Prince Harry and Meghan Markle whatever they do or wherever they go, both pro and con. Some of Harry’s and Meghan’s more vocal detractors in England will be quick off the mark, on air and in print. Prime among them will be Fox broadcaster Piers Morgan, who was fired by his former network, ITV, for not publicly apologizing for expressing his opinions about Meghan Markle on air when in fact his opinions were a central reason for his and his program’s immense popularity. More sympathetic commentators will be scheduled by Harry and his hardworking phalanx of publicists with certain outlets, part of the robust marketing campaign engineered by the publisher. Certainly, with Oprah and CBS This Morning’s Gayle King being friends with the couple, those bookings will be widely awaited.
The point is that, no matter the platform and no matter the slant—whether it’s Harry himself making an appearance at a book-signing or whether it’s veteran royal-beat writer and broadcaster Tina Brown creatively doubling down upon and/or having to eat her words that the book would “never see the light of day”—Spare will be Topic A for weeks.
The security around the manuscript for Spare—ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, who worked with Andre Agassi on his 2009 memoir—has thus far been admirably and understandably tight. Eventually, actual review copies will have to be sent out, presumably with some architecture of an embargo. At that review-copy moment, the cat’s out of the bag on Fleet Street. Some sort of leak will occur. Somebody—and there are thousands of somebodies on both sides of the Atlantic who can be classified as parties whose commercial interests would demand that they get a peek at an advance copy of Spare—will get a leak.
The leak can be digital, it can be in manuscript form, it can be incomplete, or it can be read and simply chatted about over drinks. And that leak, in whatever form, will find its way to the people who care about it the most, namely, the British tabloids. How close that leak is to the publication date will matter to Harry and his publisher, which is why security is tight, but its date of occurrence doesn’t materially affect what happens when the dam is breached, which will be that the British press will kick into high gear and begin parsing Harry’s every adjective about his family. The appetite will be especially great among those actors who have axes to grind, such as the Daily Mail, or any of the publishers whom Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have sued and/or personally blacklisted from any kind of cooperation.
First serial rights, meaning, the publication of an excerpt from the book rather than quotes and/or opinions of it, will also be carefully orchestrated by Harry and his publisher, Penguin Random House. It can be assumed that they will be spectacularly sold, but it also can be that, in this special instance, they may actually remain unexercised in favor of making the January 10 splash that much bigger. Notably, any serialization is, now, running out of time before the book’s early-January drop date. If anybody’s doing it, it’ll have to be swift.
Whether or not first serial rights are put in play, Harry’s memoir will debut on two very different stages at once. The first will be more serious, involving book review pages, critics, and that possible serialization. That will be international, but its starting point will be in New York, seat of Penguin Random House US and of many of the best periodicals in the English-speaking world. The second, far louder stage will be the book’s minute, generally hostile dissection in the UK, where Fleet Street will instantly put it under the electron microscope for any possible inaccuracy, exaggeration and/or insult to the monarchy, Charles, William, or, heaven help Harry if this is somehow the case, his late grandmother the Queen.
Windsor Knots: The relationship between Charles and Harry (seen here in 2015) has frayed … [+]
For his part, Harry’s father is a busy king. Charles has shown a remarkably fleet turn of foot since the day after his mother’s death on September 8, blasting out to seal the official transfer of the crown before the parliaments of Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and the Welsh Senedd. During all that, he seamlessly led the nation in mourning from Balmoral down to Buckingham Palace and on to Westminster, where Queen Elizabeth lay in state. Those stages of the cross included not just the military sendoff procession from Balmoral, in Scotland, but the Vigil of the Princes both in Scotland and in London, the larger London funeral as well as the reception of Commonwealth and world leaders.
At each turn Charles gave short, graceful speeches, open about his own grief, taking the time to thank everyone for their moving tributes to his mother. In short, he led. It was what he was brought up to do.
He’s limning his mother still, full of old-school get-up-and-go, making the Commonwealth and parliamentary rounds, ushering Liz Truss out the door of 10 Downing and welcoming Rishi Sunak in. In shaping his team, he’s quietly drawing his younger siblings Edward and Anne into the day-to-day work, in part in answer to the absence of Harry. In the ultra-traditional latter-day Greek play that the British Royal Family present when they publicly appear, Charles’ has been a performance that perfectly communicated the thousand-year monarchy’s one basic message: Continuity. It’s going to be a fun, fit, no-nonsense reign. He lets nothing get in his way. Spare will occur when and how it occurs, in a world quite distant from the one in which the British monarchy operates. At any rate, the King won’t be attending the Penguin Random House book party in London in support of his son.
It can be happenstance, and if it is, the coincidence is remarkable: The day after the publication date of Spare was announced, Buckingham Palace announced that the King himself would assume the ceremonial office of Captain General of the Royal Marines, the plum military patronage role that the Queen had stripped from Harry in the teeth of the Megxit negotiations in early 2021. The person who assigns those patronages is the monarch.
Charles III’s younger son has been back to England and to his family since he left for his “vacation” in western Canada in 2019, but perhaps his most remarkable achievement over the last three years is his thorough alienation of himself from them, beginning with his father and brother. Harry was caught somewhat flat-footed down in London by his grandmother’s death on September 8. He had refused an invitation from her to Balmoral outright; his early September jaunt was to be a charity trip for him and for Meghan Markle, including a pop-over to Germany to check on Invictus preparations for next year.
He should perhaps have heeded his grandmother’s invitation. When Harry got the summons from his family to Balmoral, he was late getting in the air, and his grandmother died as he was en route to Scotland. A lot of things both big and small shifted for Harry as his father immediately assumed the role of monarch that evening. Over the following week of family vigils, public processions and Elizabeth’s immense funeral, Harry’s “otherness” shined through, exactly as it did at his grandfather’s funeral last year. If anything, the gulf bewteen Harry and the Windsors showed a bit stronger because his grandmother was regent and the heraldic pomp and detail was vastly more intense. He took part but was set apart from it. Yes, he walked with his father and brother behind Elizabeth’s caisson. But he was faced with the fact that, in his absence, his home and his family had changed forever.