How New York was charmed by Camilla

MOST people don't have to wait until the age of 56 to come into their own, but you can't help feeling that the Prince of Wales has finally caught up with the zeitgeist. Or maybe it's the zeitgeist that's caught up with him.

Most of it is due to Camilla, of course. Science tells us that marriage is good for the physical and mental health of the male of the species, and Charles, after decades of well-populated loneliness, has lost the overcast look of a man who always expects it to rain. Maybe he'll never be as bouncy as Tigger, but he's no longer condemned to being forever Eeyore.

Few Americans have thought much about Charles in the 20 years since he last ventured here. Those who did tended to regard him, fairly or otherwise, as one of the rigor mortis Windsor clan who dissed their adored Diana.

But you could see the Camilla effect as soon as the newlyweds hit Manhattan on Tuesday for the dedication of a memorial garden to the 67 Britons who died on 9/11, followed by a reception at the Museum of Modern Art. Everyone noticed it. There's an exuberance and a depth to Camilla that is very appealing. She fastens people she meets with amused, kindly eyes. Her easy responses come in a sexy basso that makes you want to pull up a chair and sit down. At the reception for the families of the British victims, one expat complimented her on her cherry wool suit. She gave a confiding laugh: "It's probably the same colour as my face."

What a relief. Camilla has humour and confidence.

One of the many ironies of Prince Charles's life is that he did his midlife crisis backwards. He acquired the dazzling trophy wife first and instead of making him seem like a big macho dude, it diminished him.

Then he spent half a lifetime yearning for the comfort zone of a woman of his own age. With Diana, even when it was going well, he always felt like a flop by comparison and Americans viewed him as such. They thought of him as impossibly aloof and pompous and saved their admiration for the shy princess who knew how to "share".

This was not a happy sensation (as he would say) for the pampered heir to the British throne. "Travolta asked Diana to dance," the Prince wrote to a friend after the legendary night at the Reagan White House in 1985. "Sadly, there were no lovely actresses or singers. I had been rather hoping that Diana Ross would be there."

There was no dancing with Hollywood stars in New York. There didn't need to be.

In the Mike Bloomberg era of New York, where the businessman Mayor is likely to romp home for a second term next week, all that matters is your stock price today. The city's players sense that the Dow on Charles is going up after a long period of negative halo.

His obsession with global warming, his hokey fascination with alternative medicine, his interfaith initiatives all look pretty good in the social/political climate of the liberal East Coast.

People here are discovering with surprise that Prince Charles has much in common with large numbers of Americans who are less cynical than Brits.

His views on Islam have particular resonance. A dozen years ago he called on the West to engage with Islam. "The degree of misunderstanding between the Islamic and Western worlds remains dangerously high," he told a yawning British audience in 1993, "and the need for the two to live and work together in our increasingly interdependent world has never been greater."

Everyone laughed at his Paul Newmanish idea of creating a Duchy Originals line of organic foods at Highgrove but it now rakes in millions for his charities. In the States, success in business is a key measure of the man.

But what baffles people a bit is his comment in the 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft when they toured his model village, Poundbury (or "Pinebury" as he pronounces it).

"I only hope," he said, "that when I'm dead and gone, they might appreciate it a little bit more."

Why, I am asked, has Charles this strange desire to be appreciated?

After all, who is? In his own country, people still bow to him, after all.

Try being former Vice President and Democratic nominee Al Gore, who believes in most of the same things but after eight years of flying on Air Force Two, has to tote his laptop on Business Class.

Charles's problem is that his own generation will never recognise him as their own, not because of what he does but how he seems. He can't help the fact that his body language is a vanishing tribal semiotic that modern Britain has almost lost the ability to decode, and modern America-is not even trying to this week.

Even aristocrats don't seem like Charles any more. The 40-year- old Earl of Albemarle, a six-foot hunk with a Battle of Agincourt beard, showed up at the 9/ll reception with Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine, talking about " branding" a shirt company he's started.

"What's so different about your shirts?" I asked.

"They're expensive," he replied.

BEING flash, being a selfpromoter, is a style option for aristocrats these days as long as it's done with a knowing, self- protective wink.

Charles, raised essentially by the Queen Mother, has an earnest sensibility more attuned to grandma's era. His lack of irony about his hobbyhorses opens him to ridicule, but it also makes him, dare one say it, a better person.

Kroft said that in research for 60 Minutes American women he spoke to unfailingly raised the Prince's turnoff response to the question "Are you in love?" on the day of his engagement to the Princess of Wales: "Whatever love is" - a killing caveat that would haunt his Google life for ever.

But was that line really a window on a chilly soul - or just that upper-class instinct to negate any show of messy feeling - part of the vocabulary of British detumescenceyou learn at boarding school along with the sense that "trying too hard" is the worst thing you can do?

Self-deprecation is Charles's mode of expression, and it's never served him well in the States. Americans like to holler and they like others to holler with them. While the New York Post trashed the unfortunate balcony-bosomed midnight blue velvet number Camilla wore to the reception at the Museum of Modern Art, the Post's columnist Andrea Peyser yelled at Charles for never touching Camilla once.

But that's because we're used to a red-carpet culture of Demi Moore's hand on Ashton Kutcher's butt opposed to the tender restraint that prefers its intimacy in private, or a public couple trained to interact with the guests rather than each other when they're "on" for the night.

At the Modern Art reception they were both "on". While Charles jostled effortlessly with Yoko Ono's terrestrial headgear, Camilla was expending more energy than necessary on oxygen-eating Wall Street wives and Park Avenue matrons who body-checked any reticent worthies trying to join the conversation.

As his wife plunged through the sea of sharp elbows in the Museum's draughty atrium the Prince told me quietly: "Now everyone can see how wonderful she is."

. Tina Brown is former editor of Vanity Fair.

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