A Right Royal Makeover

We all know Prince Charles. Long-serving apprentice to the British throne; sidles through walkabouts with an anxious grin; royally messed up his marriage to Diana; lives high off the British taxpayer while he rails against modern architecture; talks to his plants. Ineffectual, eccentric, emotionally stunted. Oh, and maybe he'll step aside to let his dreamboat son William become the next King?

Charles, who says he is "one of those people who feel very strongly and deeply about things," strongly and deeply resents that image and the newspapers who promote it. His staff is laboring to change it. An important front in that campaign opens this week, when he and his old flame (and new wife) Camilla fly to the U.S. for their first big official outing as a married couple. They will attend a seminar on youth enterprise at the U.N., see President Bush for a fancy White House dinner, probably inspect clean-up work in New Orleans and visit organic farms near San Francisco. No remark, no camera angle that can be nailed down in advance has been left to chance, but the tabloids sending their reporters on his plane (at $11,000 apiece) are on high gaffe alert. Will Charles, who asked 12 years ago, "How can any realistic person not take the threat of global warming seriously?" and intends to raise the issue privately with Bush, signal the slightest flicker of frustration with the President in public? Will someone, somewhere hold up a sign that implies that Yanks prefer Diana to Camilla?

Like all caricatures, the view of Charles as not quite connected with the world holds some truth. Yet it is also fair to say that within the cocoon of royalty, and despite the disorder that dominated his personal life during his marriage to Diana, he has created a role for himself of such scope that if he were a commoner, you would call it a remarkable and successful career. Over time he has figured out how to use the powers of his position to give practical outlet to a wide range of passionate convictions about how to improve the world.

After listening to a probation official on the radio, he decided in 1976 to put his $14,800 Navy severance pay toward helping down-and-out young people. From that modest start his Prince's Trust has become the country's largest foundation helping youth in need; it's given money and advice to more than 60,000 young people to help them start their own businesses. As a kind of charitable entrepreneur, Charles runs 15 other foundations, all but two his own brainchildren, that raise over $190 million per year, employ 1,400 and attract 10,000 volunteers, making his the biggest multipurpose philanthropy in Britain.

Charles' goals are not exactly radical, but neither are they blandly inoffensive. He promotes organic farming, alternative medicine and urban planning reforms to make communities more livable. He wants business to be more environmentally and socially conscious. Many of his charities use his stature to bring together people at loggerheads, such as ceos and environmental activists, or take the high and mighty to places like prisons and drug clinics they would never otherwise see. And he also views himself as a gadfly in chief, bringing attention to neglected ideas and people. Bob Geldof, the rough-hewn rock star and businessman whose contempt for formality is acute, enthuses about Prince Charles: "He does a lot, he's hugely underappreciated. He takes the side of the people over what the newspapers and the biens pensants want. I have a lot of time for him. He kicks up a fuss."

There's more: Charles' preoccupations are often prescient. Organic farming was marginal to the point of ridicule when he first started converting his Gloucestershire farm 20 years ago; David Wilson, the manager, said "even within his own organization, people felt it was dangerous, wacky, could be shot down." Now 4% of British farmland has gone organic and the food company Charles formed to provide a market for organic produce, Duchy Originals, had sales last year of $70 million (all profits to his charities). His attacks on soulless modern architecture have resonated with the public — Poundbury, a model village he developed using traditional materials and modern ideas about mixing rich and poor, is popular with residents — and alongside the work of others, may have influenced politicians. Hank Dittmar, head of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, says Charles' conviction that cities should be built to human scale with an emphasis on livability "has become government policy. I'm not sure he gets much credit for it."

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