As if it couldn’t get worse for the royal family. Hot on the heels of The Crown’s “Annus Horribilis”—a season five episode dramatizing what was arguably the worst personal year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, between her children’s shattered marriages and tabloid scandals, and her Windsor Castle fire—the Netflix series recreates one of King Charles’s most humiliating moments. In the episode “The Way Ahead,” which airs about two months after Charles finally became king, Dominic West and Olivia Williams reenact the intimate 1989 phone call between Charles and Camilla that was illegally recorded, then years later printed and parodied all over the world, and dubbed “Camillagate” by some, “Tampongate” by others.
“God, I want to feel my way along you, all over you, up and down you,” West, as Charles, says, reading verbatim excerpts of the actual transcript of the infamous phone call. “God, I just wish I could live in your trousers, it would be so much easier.”
“What are you going to turn into?” laughs Williams as Camilla. “A pair of knickers?”
“Or, God forbid, a Tampax,” jests Charles. “Just my luck.”
The fifth season of The Crown has already garnered criticism for premiering so soon after the queen’s death and, with 10 new episodes depicting the British royal family from 1991 to 1997, likely returning unpleasant scandals to public consciousness. Dame Judi Dench has called for the series to add a title card before each episode clarifying that the episodes are dramatized. (Netflix has added a disclaimer to the description of its season five trailer.) Those critics might take particular issue with “The Way Ahead,” which especially blurs the line between fact and fiction given that certain details of the incident in the episode (such as Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, picking up the phone call from Charles) are invented, while others, like much of the transcript, are taken nearly word for word.
In a phone call with Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote about the conversation in Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, the best-selling royal biographer tells Vanity Fair, “It did strike me as more than ironic that when so much of the series is made up—dialogue made up, scenes made up—that it would seek refuge in the factual when it suited their purposes and demean[ed the royal family]. So here we do have an instance in a series that is largely fictional of them recreating the facts of what [Charles and Camilla] said because the [actual words] put them in a very bad light.”
If you look past the racy language, Smith admits that the extended conversation—which covered subjects more serious than sexy—did provide interesting new insight into the relationship between Charles and Camilla when it was first published by British newspapers in 1993.
“What I found fascinating about it was really not so much the language that they used, which was eye-opening for the heir apparent and his girlfriend, but that it showed their dynamic—that she was attuned to nuance and she was shrewd and she understood the motivations of other people and how people even in their social set bowed and scraped to him because he was who he was,” says Smith. “Also, that she really understood that he needed to be constantly reassured because he was feeling very vulnerable…She was being very maternal to him. He was being insecure. Those are the things that I tried to emphasize [in my book]. But I think it takes on a whole new and potentially damaging aspect when you recreate those words…I definitely quoted the language, but I did it, I think, in a way that put everything into a sympathetic context.”
The original phone conversation was meant to be private. In December 1989, Parker Bowles was inside her family home speaking to Prince Charles at night. Her husband was away at work, according to Smith’s biography of Charles, but her children were in the house for the holidays. And Prince Charles, who had just wrapped up an exhausting tour, was speaking from the home of a friend, Anne Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster. Somehow, in a mystery that still has not been solved, audio was captured of the call. The official story was that an amateur radio enthusiast accidentally stumbled upon the conversation with high-tech scanning equipment. But, according to the LA Times, given that the tape surfaced within a month that a private Princess Diana call was captured and featured high-quality recording, the possibility was raised that “British internal intelligence agencies may have been involved in taping the original conversations and, for reasons unknown, leaking them to the press.”
In January 1993—mere weeks after the queen’s “annus horribilis” ended—the UK papers Sunday Mirror and People printed the entire transcript of the call. As if the transcript was not damning enough, a telephone hotline was set up to allow listeners to hear the actual audio. There were also cartoon parodies and television sketches—on Saturday Night Live, Dana Carvey ended his run by playing Charles in costume as a tampon. Speaking about the PR impact “Camillagate” had on Charles and Camilla, Smith says, “It did him and her a lot of damage. His popularity plummeted and people were questioning his fitness to be king.”
