Childhood in a Fishbowl
Having famous parents can be so embarrassing. How's a kid going to cope?
BY LANCE MORROW
To have parents who are, as they say, dysfunctional--in this case, needy, infantile, self-indulgent, narcissistic, ruthlessly selfish hysterics who use up all the oxygen in the room and then gasp self-pityingly that they are having trouble breathing--is a maturing burden for a child, and a sad kind of discipline.
To have parents who are dysfunctional, and famous too, is a cruel and unusual fate. (Maybe not so unusual nowadays).
Children are sensitive to the slightest hint of humiliation; they tend to be almost bizarrely shamed by anything in their parents' behavior that smacks of the unconventional. What's a kid to do, then, when his parents' entire lives constantly erupt in spectacles of global embarrassment?
A child in such circumstances may become a monster or a drunk, as the children of the famous sometimes do. Or else he submits to a reversal in nature: he accepts his role as the grownup in the house. He parents his infantile parents. He skips much of childhood and gets to be 14 going on 45.
At one time, the myth of monarchy presented the King as a father figure. This was almost always wishful thinking. The royal houses of the world probably have a slightly worse record for producing sane, responsible, intelligent parents than most families do. Monarchs have rarely been role models of any kind, probably because they felt no need to be. The role of the inspired prince as leader--the type of whom Charles is the ghost's memory of a remnant--vanished long ago, and following Agincourt, the servants have done the fighting. Princes of the royal blood since then have opened trade shows or talked to trees.
Of course, it is hard enough to be a decent and intelligent private person. In the late 20th century, when the media magnify every private witlessness of public figures, then even the appearances of traditional majesty are at risk. Walter Bagehot wrote of the monarchy in the 19th century: "You must not let daylight in upon magic." You must not let daylight in upon Dracula either. Relentless public exposure is the death of grandeur, especially when there are tapes from the phone conversations. The tabloid is to the House of Windsor as a summer dawn to the Transylvanian count.
Perhaps we make a mistake to insist that the monarchy should be majestic. That is only one way for the royals to be exemplary. Homer's gods on Olympus, after all, played out elaborate soap operas of venality, stupidity, cruelty and greed. The Windsors, bearing up well under their hereditary burden of chinlessness and a tendency to run to twits, managed nonetheless to turn the saga of the stunningly unbright Duke and Duchess of Windsor into one of the century's great love stories. Perhaps Charles and Diana, in their follies, are simply enlarging the dramatic franchise of the family, giving it a contemporary feel.
Even so, their performance is witness to the truth of John F. Kennedy's famous cliche: "Life is unfair." The unfairness, in the case of Charles and Diana, lies in the fact that classically, it is their children who must pay so much of the price for the silly lives of their parents.
Being the child of the famous has always been especially hard, in part because of the danger that the child cannot live up to the parent's public success (no matter how awful the parent might have been in private). And only modest success seems a dramatic falling off: the Sean Lennon, Gary Crosby, Nancy Sinatra syndrome. But Prince William's future seems assured; he can hardly fail to surpass his father.
Fame is often difficult for parents to cope with; but surely it imposes upon them an obligation where their children are concerned. A lot of illustrious parents have produced unhappy offspring. Winston Churchill, himself a neglected child, did not do well with his profligate boozehound son Randolph. On the other hand, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis raised sane and decent children against what, one guesses, were considerable odds. Bill and Hillary Clinton, whatever their private shortcomings, seem to be faring well in giving their daughter a constructive, intelligent upbringing.
Raising children is as unscientific as begetting them, and the ultimate results are unpredictable. Whether the parents should be held responsible for the children is problematic; if justice has not vanished from the universe, however, no child should be held responsible for his or her parents.
Maybe there is a Law of Procreational Dynamics stating that for each generation there is an equal and opposite generation--meaning that for each neurotic, childish father or mother there will come next a mature, productive son or daughter. The House of Windsor lives in hope.