In November 1997, two months after Diana was laid to rest at Althorp, Charles treated Harry to a much-needed break, taking him along on a state visit to South Africa. One of the highlights for the starstruck thirteen-year-old, who was becoming as interested in beautiful girls as he was in all things military, was the opportunity to meet the Spice Girls at a concert in Pretoria for Nelson Mandela. Posing for the obligatory photo op between Emma Bunton (Baby Spice) and Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice), Harry declared it the best day of his life. Harry had also urged his papa to take him to see Rorke’s Drift, site of a legendary battle between British forces and Zulu warriors. One of Harry’s favorite movies was Zulu; and he had become fascinated by the real story behind it. It was at Rorke’s Drift where Harry solemnly told his papa that one day he too planned to fight for Queen and country.
Harry had another life-changing experience during this trip, when Tiggy took him on safari in Botswana while Charles was busy on official duties. Harry was enthralled with Africa’s expansive red earth, its magical wildlife, and the spectacular sunsets of purple, red, and gold.
Botswana, in particular, captured Harry’s heart. Two years later when he was fifteen, he came back, with Tiggy acting as chaperone. It would be the first of several return visits.
FROM MRS. MYNORS’ to Wetherby to Ludgrove, and now to the venerable Eton, Harry was following William from school to school as if he were tracking his elder brother’s footsteps on the beach or stepping into the imprints he’d made in the snow. The Waleses had insisted their sons attend the lofty institution founded in 1440 by Henry VI. Not only has Eton educated several royal boys, but it’s also produced nineteen prime ministers and even graduated a number of other renowned redheads, including Harry’s uncle Charles Spencer and film stars Eddie Redmayne and Damian Lewis.
On September 2, 1998, just thirteen days shy of his fourteenth birthday, Harry became an F-tit, a first-year Etonian, at Manor House, the same residency house where William was a student. In fact William acted as his younger brother’s tour guide, starting with the locales where Harry would spend the lion’s share of his downtime, such as the common room and the games room. Harry noticed that the F-tits’ locker room, where they were required to deposit their schoolbooks and outdoor boots, looked straight onto the street, offering a clear view to both tourists and paparazzi—quite unlike the sheltered atmosphere at Ludgrove. Newspapers were not verboten at Eton, so Harry could easily read what was being written about his family.
Nestled in the town of the same name, across the Thames from Windsor, Eton College (which is actually what Americans would call a private high school, and what the English would call a public school) has its own slang, rituals, and dress code. The boys still resemble charming post-Edwardians out of the pages of Brideshead Revisited, in pinstriped trousers, long black tailcoats with waistcoats, and white shirts with a stiff white collar and tie. The lingo conjures Harry Potter. Scholars who live on campus are known as Collagers, while the Oppidans live in boardinghouses in the town, which, with its half-timbered facades in the High Street, still bears some of the elements of a quaint English village. Instructors are beaks, and a centrally located lamppost on the campus is known as the burning bush. The abracadabra is the school’s timetable, and the famed rowers are wet bobs.
After chapel on Sundays, Harry and his mates would walk across the bridge into town, where they might grab a Big Mac and catch the latest action flick at the cinema on Windsor High Street. If they felt really daring and were flush with dosh, they’d sneak off to the Windsor races. When they were upperclassmen, they would slink into a pub or meet up with the girls who attended St. Mary’s School Ascot in Berkshire. St. Mary’s motto was “Women in time will come to do much.”
Harry and company couldn’t get into too much trouble, however, because they had to be back in their respective houses at Eton by eight-fifteen on Sunday evening.
It didn’t take long before Harry became comfortable enough at Eton to slip back into the role of class clown. He was a poorer student than William, but a much better athlete. Where Harry excelled, however, was as a prankster. He would spend an entire class hiding behind the drapes, revealing himself only when the beak was about to mark him absent, after calling his name from the roll several times, only to hear muffled giggles in reply. A less innocuous jest involved balancing a book on the top of a door so that it would bean the beak on the head when he opened it, convulsing Harry and his classmates with laughter. Harry never selected a volume that was heavy enough to wound someone, but it certainly startled the hell out of the victim.
The prince never got caught and no one ever ratted him out. Perhaps royalty has its privileges. And the more untouchable Harry became, the more he pushed his luck. Unfortunately, his grades were the consequences of his actions. By the end of Harry’s E, or second, year at Eton, he was in the bottom group of students.
Harry was behaving more like a court jester than a prince, but his shenanigans were the only tools he seemed to have for coping with the unimaginably awful loss of his mother. He was unable to mourn her when he should have been able to and needed to, but had been forced to suppress his emotions instead; and now he was acting up and acting out. Like his mum, Harry craved attention and affection. But like her, he also had a self-destructive streak.
By 2001, Harry was in his third year of high school—and was unsupervised when he needed it most. William was taking his gap year between high school graduation and university; and their father was either off on official business or at Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s cottage at the edge of Balmoral.
Charles had, however, given his consent to the transformation of his downstairs cellar at Highgrove into a clubhouse-cum-disco for Harry and his aristocratic Gloucestershire pals, the punning, rhyming Glosse Posse. Club H’s two cavernous subterranean rooms with their vaulted ceilings and state-of-the-art audio system were a teenage boy’s dream. Cream-colored sofas provided cushy seating. The walls of the disco room were painted black, which would have made the Rolling Stones proud. A portrait of the Abdicator, Harry’s disgraced ancestor Edward VIII, was hung upside down in the loo.
Although Charles had leveled a strict no-smoking, no-alcohol policy in Club H, Harry and his posse flouted it with impunity. He had first lit up on the proverbial playing fields of Eton, and by the time he was sixteen he was regularly inhaling Marlboro Reds. A Highgrove aide dropped a dime on Harry after a weekly sweep of Club H’s detritus. Although Charles detested cigarettes, he more or less forgave his son.
Unfortunately, tobacco consumption was the mere tip of Harry’s acting out. Still underage, he was also a regular at the Rattlebone Inn, a Tudor-era pub six miles from Highgrove, where his older friends cheerfully bought him pints of beer with whisky chasers; or Rattlebone’s specialty, the potent Pleasant Plucker cider. Afterward, an already intoxicated prince and his mates would return to Club H, where the party would continue. Although Charles had been ignorant of the excursions to the Rattlebone, he was alerted to another transgression when the distinct aroma of marijuana came wafting up from the cellar.
According to Harry’s biographer Katie Nicholl, the prince first smoked pot at Eton, turned on by his older cousin and mentor Nicholas Knatchbull. Harry’s parents allegedly never experimented with drugs; in fact they were strictly against them. Calling his younger son on the carpet, Charles questioned Harry’s choice of friends: were they really the right circle—or posse—for a prince to surround himself with?
In the first few years after Diana’s death the British press had maintained a fairly respectful distance from her sons. But Fleet Street couldn’t black out reports of the underage Harry’s drinking and drug use. On January 13, 2002, the News of the World broke the story of Harry’s summer of shenanigans at the Rattlebone Inn, stating that his protection officers had been present during his after-hours drinking and toking in the pub’s backroom bar, nicknamed the “magic room.” More embarrassing were the reports of Harry’s drunken insults of the bar’s F
rench manager, whom he’d called Froggie and addressed with another un-princely Anglo-Saxon F-word. Locals were reportedly disgusted by the prince’s rudeness, muttering “little brat” under their collective breath, sharing the opinion that it was clearly inappropriate for an underage prince to be drunk as a lord and raising his voice to staff, unsupervised by the adults responsible for curbing him. And it wasn’t just in his own backyard at the Rattlebone Inn. Harry, who was still in his mid-teens, was either throwing up or passing out in London’s poshest watering holes on a nearly nightly basis, earning the nickname “The Sponge.”
During the summer of 2001, Harry had attended the Copa de Plata polo matches in Sotogrande on the Costa del Sol, where he was spotted smoking and drinking in several of Marbella’s nightclubs. Worse, he tore up a local golf course pretending it was his personal polo pitch, jockeying golf carts as if they were ponies.
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone at the time—Harry least of all—that his acting out wasn’t just typical adolescent wild-oat-sowing, but cries for help from a young man in deep pain.
No one listened.
So the shouting got louder.
After Charles’s absentee parenting was called into question, he formed a SWAT team to convince the News of the World to soften the blow by running the least damaging story possible. Harry’s penance consisted of an apology and a day at the Featherstone Lodge Rehabilitation Centre in Peckham, South London, where he spoke to recovering cocaine and heroin addicts. Harry was shaken by the experience but not stirred enough to sober up.
It was Camilla—whom Harry had finally been introduced to back in the early summer months of 1998, nearly a year after his mother’s death—who convinced Charles that his son needed a strong father figure in his life. She encouraged her lover to be more present for both Harry and William.
Back at Eton, there was much-needed structure. Harry, like William, was keen to downplay his royal status and quick to change the subject when others tried to discuss it or make a fuss over him. He wanted to be like everyone else. Or most of all, like his mother. On Harry’s eighteenth birthday, September 15, 2002, he announced, “I want to carry on the things that [my mother] didn’t quite finish. I have always wanted to, but I was too young.”
Where Harry was most himself, however, was in the CCF, the Combined Cadet Force. As he’d always been enamored of all things army, that was the section he signed up for. Napoleon’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, famously declared that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” referencing the exemplary training of the college’s generations of cadets.
In October 2002, Harry was promoted to lance corporal. He led a detachment of forty-eight fellow cadets in Eton’s famous Tattoo.
Cadet Harry Wales had found a purpose.
Instead of self-destructive acting out with the Glosse Posse, the prince now devoted his weekends to leading his platoon on training exercises.
Harry had righted the ship. He took his CCF responsibilities very seriously, insisting his cadets sleep with their guns and ambushing them during night watches to make sure they were on the ball at all times. As a result of his military training and his passion both for rugby and for Eton’s famously punishing “Wall Game,” Harry bulked up; which, combined with his adolescent growth spurt, transformed the boy who’d arrived at Eton as a five-foot-nothing F-tit into a muscular six-footer.
He still struggled academically and had a difficult time with his A levels, the secondary school leaving qualification exams. But by then Harry had reached an important decision: he didn’t need spectacular exams to get into university—because he wasn’t going. Cadet Wales had set his sights instead on matriculating at Sandhurst, England’s prestigious Royal Military Academy.
And then, as the saying goes, it all went arse over tit.
In his final year at Eton with Sandhurst within his sights, Harry returned to his indifferent attitude toward his academics, failing two of his A levels. More humiliating, his tutors demanded that he be left back, repeating the year so he could catch up.
But instead of cramming like mad for his retests, Harry sneaked off with his pal Guy Pelly to the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club in Windsor. Speaking of arses, both teens had earned a reputation for mooning unsuspecting tourists outside Manor House—but this was a stunt on steroids.
With the prince in tow, Guy climbed to the apex of a forty-foot-high VIP tent and stripped to the buff. At that location and height, regardless of what Harry was (or wasn’t) wearing, he became a security risk, as well as tabloid fodder. And the press did indeed have a field day. One front-page headline demanded to know SO HARRY, HOW’S YOUR A-LEVEL REVISION GOING? Harry’s housemaster Dr. Gailey was livid. So was Prince Charles.
And yet this chain-smoking, cocktail-drinking, super-confident young man whom the press had nicknamed “Hooray Harry” had also been voted Britain’s most eligible bachelor by Harper’s Bazaar. Although the prince certainly had no shortage of giggling female admirers, he was also something of a fixer-upper.
Harry did eventually manage to get the grades for Sandhurst, but the Royal Military Academy did not accept cadets under the age of twenty; so Harry had to extend his gap year after graduating from Eton in 2003.
It was a summer of overindulgence. Harry had nearly flunked geography at Eton, but he needed no maps to find his way into countless bars and pubs from Chelsea to Mayfair to Knightsbridge, imbibing everything from beer to exotic cocktails, remaining at some watering holes long after last call. In one of them, Nam Long Le Shaker, Harry earned the dubious distinction of being able to drink three of their specialty White Panthers in quick succession. This was a delicious but potent tropical concoction served in a goblet so large it was meant to be for two.
HARRY IS OUT OF CONTROL screamed the headlines when he was photographed stumbling bleary-eyed into the night or indulging in the sort of public displays of affection with a young lady that should have been kept private.
The paparazzi bird-dogged him everywhere, even to a cattle farm in the Australian outback, where Charles sent him to cool his heels; but his antics sold papers. Harry had arrived during a republican outcry against the taxpayers being soaked for the £250,000 cost of his 24-7 protection team—a necessity, after a gate-crasher who billed himself as a “comedy terrorist” got close enough to kiss William on both cheeks during his twenty-first birthday bash a few months earlier. In New York City and Washington, DC, the horrific events of 9/11 were still open wounds, so the palace had a point; life wasn’t a fairy tale anymore.
But Harry’s gap year ticked on. Instead of entering Sandhurst on schedule, he would head off to explore Africa as William had done. It would change his life—but not before one more night of being caught in the flashbulbs being Harry again. This time he seemed to be emulating his uncle Andrew, photographed at the swanky disco Chinawhite with a topless model. For two years, beginning in 1981, “Randy Andy” dated the American actress/model Kathleen “Koo” Stark. At the time, Ms. Stark was described as a “porn star” because she’d performed a steamy same-sex love scene in the 1976 feature Emily, then Britain’s highest-grossing soft-core film.
If anyone had paused for a moment, wouldn’t they have stopped to ask whether all of Harry’s boozing was self-medication? And that perhaps he was dancing as fast as he could so he wouldn’t feel the pain?
It was time to channel Mummy instead.
To everything there is a season, and it was a time to heal.
TO CONTINUE HIS mum’s charity work, accompanied by Prince Charles’s head of press, Harry spent the next two months in the mountainous but tiny landlocked African kingdom of Lesotho, which means “forgotten kingdom.” Lesotho has a population of two million people, but one of the highest rates of AIDS in the world. Harry and the younger brother of King Letsie III, Prince Seeiso—another second son who had tragically lost his mother when he was young—hit it off so well that they filmed a documentary together, The Forgotten Kingdom. The film focuses on
their work at the Mants’ase Orphanage in the town of Mophato.
In Africa, Harry found his footing, especially at the orphanage. He built fences and planted shade trees. But he was particularly wonderful with the kids. Like his mum, he was unafraid to get close to children who were ill and give them a much-needed cuddle. And he’d brought rugby and soccer balls, patiently teaching games to the boys and girls, many of whom had lost parents to AIDS.
Harry fought back tears as he cradled Liketsu, a ten-month-old girl no bigger than a doll who had been raped by her stepfather. The man had AIDS and had been told by a witch doctor that having sex with a child would cure him. After Harry left Lesotho, not only did he continue to write to Liketsu’s caregivers, he secretly returned to Lesotho the following September to check in on her progress.
Harry’s passion and enthusiasm for the people of Lesotho and for the orphanage project were palpable. He had found his element. Moreover, he was able to put time and space between his wild child reputation and the responsible young adult he was becoming.
The people Harry met in Lesotho remained prominent in his memory after he eventually returned to the UK to commence his training at Sandhurst. Lesotho would never be a “forgotten kingdom” to him.
He had just one stopover to make first. In April 2004, Harry headed to Cape Town—the first of many such visits he would enjoy over the next half-dozen years or so—to see his current squeeze, Zimbabwe-born Chelsy Yvonne Davy. A lushly beautiful free spirit, very smart, very blond, and a year younger than Harry, Chelsy was the daughter of a safari park owner and a former Miss Coca-Cola Rhodesia. Having abandoned her early thoughts of a professional modeling career for weightier pursuits, after completing her A levels, Chelsy had quit England for the University of Cape Town, where she was studying economics, politics, and philosophy.
Chelsy was a student at Cheltenham Ladies’ College near Highgrove when she was introduced to Harry by a mutual friend who was a member of his Glosse Posse. Chelsy combined golden goddess looks with the rough-and-tumble ethos of a tomboy. Harry became smitten when she told him she could ride a horse bareback and strangle a snake with her bare hands. Moreover, she was utterly unimpressed by his title: she just thought he was hot. Their physical chemistry was combustible.
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