Now that Prince What’s-His-Name has made his fashionably late arrival and media royal womb watchers are all agog, it behooves a former member of the fraternity to offer the benefit of his experience to help them move on from their current trauma.
In the 1980s, as a woman’s magazine editor duty-bound to run cover stories about the new baby’s super-celebrity grandmother, I published one showing her holding up Prince William, with a line reading “Princess Diana Faces the ‘Terrible Twos’ and Baby No. 2,” based on nothing more than a suspicion that the royal timetable called for a backup prince sooner than later.
The day the issue came out, the Palace announced Diana’s second pregnancy, and I was besieged by phone calls from reporters about how we knew. To my shame I responded with exquisite bad taste, “Inside information.”
Far-thinking royalty journalists should be marking their 2015 calendars since, even with the monarchy bench now three-deep, William and Kate are not likely to want to rear an only child.
Meanwhile, a retired member of the fraternity will be watching all the jubilation with pure pleasure at news that for a change doesn’t make him sick of the human race.
MORE.