For those of you who think that Josh O’Connor is too good-looking to play Prince Charles in The Crown, take a few minutes and type the words “young Prince Charles” into Google search. Yes, the 72-year-old prince—that sometimes clueless, often-maligned, squirrel-adopting, plant-befriending, shoelace-ironing perennial king-in-waiting—was once a hottie.
When the young Prince of Wales visited the United States, first with his sister, Princess Anne, in 1970 and then solo in 1977, hundreds of girls and young women lined up to meet him at the airport like he was a member of The Beatles. In California, on the final leg of his 1977 trip, one of the waiting throng told The New York Times, “My friend, Debbie Noto, met him at the Bank of America and she was gushing all day about it.” And a young student editor at a college newspaper asked the prince, “What do you think of California girls? I’m one.”
Nothing like a man in uniform.
Photo: Getty ImagesCharles’s 1970 visit was a starry affair that could possibly have changed the course of history. Reports at the time suggested that then-President Richard Nixon tried to set the prince up with his eldest daughter, Tricia, then 24 to Charles’s 21. The two were seated together at a black-tie dinner at the White House and attended several social events over the course of the prince’s weekend in Washington, during which he and Anne stayed at the White House. “That was quite amusing, I must say,” Prince Charles told a CNN interviewer several years ago. “That was the time they tried to marry me off to Tricia Nixon.”
After Charles and Anne left Washington to go back home to England, Tricia told reporters that the prince was an “excellent dancer,” adding, “The house is going to seem empty without them.” But the royal biographer, Anthony Holden, said the match was ill-fated from the very first date. Charles was “distinctly annoyed” and found Tricia “plastic and artificial,” Holden wrote. (Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox in a White House wedding the next year.)