A Prince and His Princess Arrive: Charles and Di

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Charles, for his part, sometimes seems rather lost. After years of being the No. 1 royal attraction, he has been eclipsed by his wife. This both irks and relieves him. Becoming a father and taking a supporting role have made this reflective, well-meaning man even more introspective. Years ago he had seemed to pass from gawky youth directly to a kind of complacent middle age. Only now does he appear to be going through a kind of belated identity crisis, questioning the certainties that he once routinely accepted.

In a long conversation last summer with Andrew Stephen, a senior editor of the London Sunday Times Magazine, Charles at times sounded downright angst- ridden. "The more sophisticated, the more technologically advanced we become, and the more we feel we can dominate nature," he mused, "the more we feel that it's one of those difficult ironies to bear that we should actually depart and shuffle off this mortal coil." After years of stiff formality, he yearns for simple verities, and talked longingly about the rewards of working with his hands on a farm in Cornwall. "I think it's terribly therapeutic, funnily enough, and there's something very important about working on land and actual manual labor, mucking out cattle yards, you know, and things like that." But Charles is also hardheaded: using innovative agricultural practices and more rigorous management, he has increased profits from his patrimony, the Duchy of Cornwall, his major source of income.

Charles is attracted to certain strains of New Age thinking. He longs to combine pragmatism with compassion. He is an admirer of the "small is beautiful" philosophy of the British economist E.F. Schumacher, and is a patron of a charity that Schumacher started to help Third World nations develop simple industrial and agricultural tools. As president of the British Medical Association during 1982, he stressed the need for what he calls "complementary medicine"--that is, "looking at a person not so much as a machine, but as the whole, in a classic, ancient sense." Charles is drawn to asceticism: he apparently fasts occasionally and rarely eats red meat. He shies away from being called a vegetarian, maintaining that he simply prefers fish and fowl. Diana, who also eschews meat, attributes her imperial slimness (which some palace watchers have whispered was anorexia) to the fact that at public functions "it's impossible to talk and eat at the same time."

As to the rumors that Charles has consulted clairvoyants and dabbled with a Ouija board in order to contact his beloved uncle, Lord Mountbatten, who was assassinated by I.R.A. terrorists in 1979, the Prince is incredulous. "I feel riveted by the way this has developed because I've seen articles saying I play with Ouija boards," he said on ITV. "I don't even know what they are."