Company from Britain

Not all innocents abroad are U.S. tourists by any means. This week, heading the royal road show out of London, Prince Charles and Princess Anne will wing into Washington direct from a two-week tour of Canada for their first U.S. visit. The object, as the White House and Buckingham Palace rather cloyingly put it, is to bring the young people of the two nations together. As the official guests of Tricia Nixon and David and Julie Eisenhower, the royal pair will be treated to a barbecue and swimming at Camp David, a baseball game at Washington's Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, a floating lunch down the Potomac, and sightseeing at Mount Vernon and a wildlife research center in Laurel, Md. The highlight will be a dinner-dance on the south lawn of the White House with 700 guests, mostly young, and two rock bands.

As much on display as the 21-year-old future King of England will be his kid sister, Princess Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise, 19, fourth in line for the British throne and, it is said, something of a swinger. Plump and dowdy as a teenager, Anne, according to Women's Wear Daily, the supreme authority for all such judgments, has succeeded at "slimming down and picking up more graceful airs." Moreover, the best is yet to be, says W.W.D.: "She shows signs of a beauty that will probably come with maturity."

Anne zips around London at a royal clip in her own dark blue Rover 2000, dances till dawn at various London nightspots (Mother never waits up for her), rides in horse trials all over the country, buys many of her clothes off the peg in London's King's Road boutiques and wears severe Stetson-style hats instead of the flowery horrors that crown so many royal heads. Last year she sent Britons into paroxysms of one sort or another when she jumped onstage for the finale of the rock musical Hair and spent ten wild minutes dancing with cast members, many of whom were scantily clad.

Superdeb. "Princess Anne lives the same sort of life as many upper-class English girls," says a Buckingham Palace spokesman --except that she is richer than most (an allowance of -L-6,000 or $14,400 a year), her friends have to call her "Ma'am," and a private detective accompanies her everywhere. She also has decidedly more fringe benefits, what with her furnished three-room suite in Buckingham Palace, a fleet of helicopters available to whisk her here and there, access to the world's most famous and fascinating people and invitations to a constant round of elite parties and balls. "In a way," the spokesman adds, "she is a sort of superdeb. She has a part-time job, and she has a lot of fun."

Parental restrictions are few, the emphasis being on freedom and a sense of normalcy. She attended Benenden School, which caters to girls of the British upper class and is rated exclusive but by no means cloistered. No great shakes academically, Anne failed to qualify for a university this fall, but no one seemed to care, least of all the princess. "When Anne says she is intellectually lazy," said her former housemistress at Benenden, "I can't refute it." So far the young princess has been content to ride, sail, party, ski and tend to the ribbon-cutting chores that are the appointed lot of royalty. Though Prince Philip reportedly told a friend he would like to see his daughter "gain some sort of solid achievement," he quickly added: "It is difficult to know in what."

If Anne seems a bit frivolous and perhaps even quaintly anachronistic in this era of intense involvement, it may be that her role--reminiscent of Princess Margaret's a generation ago--calls for nothing more.

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