Puissant Prince

Some months ago in Paris gendarmes made the rounds of the newsstands, snatched up all visible copies of a scandal sheet called Ecoutez-Moi ("Listen To Me"), bore them off to headquarters, fed them to the furnace. The gendarmes were obeying orders from the Foreign Office, which had been stirred to action by the British Embassy, which had been outraged by an article entitled "The Prince of Wales is Bedworthy!"

From the French point of view, the offending article was far from unfriendly. "The most puzzling problem regarding the life of the Prince of Wales," it read, "is that of his celibacy. Why, it is asked, the Prince being on the threshold of 40, has he never married? It has been said the Prince is a misogynist. Nothing is more false. The Prince is of healthy customs and has given superabundant proofs of his taste for the fair sex."

Ecoutez-Moi proceeded to document a case which led to this conclusion: H. R. H. is in love with a commoner; his mother has given him until the end of 1935 to choose an acceptable wife; after that he must accept whomever his mother designates.

Unaware or indifferent that it had been scooped, Bernarr Macfadden's Liberty lately sought the answer to the same question. Last week it splashed its answer in a leading article, loudly advertised it in newspaper full pages:

"WHY THE PRINCE OF WALES WILL NEVER MARRY! Why the World's Most Popular Man is Certain To Remain Single . . . An Authorized, Intimate, Revealing Story. . . ."

If less revealing than the story in Ecoutez-Moi, which detailed the crises in H. R. H.'s sex life, Liberty was certainly more polite. Typical excerpt:

"It is perfectly easy to understand why the Prince of Wales has never married.

" 'He's been too busy,' a man very close to him explained. 'It's as simple as falling off a log.' "

Liberty's conclusion: During the years when his family would normally have been picking a mate for him, Wales was serving his country, in the War, as a supersalesman of the Empire, as understudy to his aging father. Now, beyond the marrying-off age, he is interested only in commoners. He will not marry nor will he abdicate. He will be Great Britain's "Bachelor King." "It is a fact that the Prince Charming of the world is gone forever. In his place stands the Serious Prince."

Liberty's "intimate revelations" were written by Frazier ("Spike") Hunt, old-time journalist and War correspondent. He owns a ranch in Western Alberta near the Prince's ranch, proudly boasts that he and H. R. H. are "good neighbors."

Liberty advertised that Journalist Hunt got his story "after a special trip to England, which included the only magazine or newspaper interview the Prince has ever granted in historic old St. James's Palace." What Liberty did not know, or did not say, was that five years ago Frazier Hunt wrote for Hearst's Cosmopolitan an interview with the Prince of Wales "in his great study in historic old St. James's Palace." Excerpts from Hunt's 1929 interview with H. R. H.: "The last thing in the world he is thinking about is abdication. . . . Here was a Prince thinking deeply and profoundly about great and serious problems. . . . He is a man of duty today--a man of destiny."

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