Prince Harry’s 416-page, heavily co-written new memoir, Spare—the title a nod to the joke that a future queen must birth an “heir and a spare”—has been kept under close guard. But as its pub day approaches on January 10, the Guardian, the New York Post, the Sun, and other major newspapers have gotten ahold of an advance copy. Well, from what’s been revealed in the pages of these esteemed publications, we dare say that there’s much, much more to Harry than we ever knew.
Whether “H” is experimenting with cocaine, losing his virginity to a much older woman on a grassy knoll behind a bar, or regretting watching Meghan Markle’s love scenes in Suits, what these dailies have published indicates that there’s plenty in this tell-all to entertain and titillate. So, here are five choice items from Spare.
Item 1: The Guardian on Wednesday detailed a particularly disturbing incident discussed in the book in which by Harry’s account, he was attacked by his older brother, William, over the spare’s wife. The all-out battle took place at Harry’s home in London in 2019 and had William calling Markle “difficult,” “rude,” and “abrasive,” which Harry interpreted as a “parrot[ing] of the press narrative” against his wife.
The confrontation escalated, Harry writes, until William “grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and … knocked me to the floor.”
Item 2: Harry’s teenage years were full of headline-grabbing blunders. For example, losing his virginity didn’t happen with a school sweetheart, but in a fast frolic on a patch of grass behind a bar with an “older woman,” as Page Six revealed.
“Inglorious episode,” the Duke of Sussex dishes on the experience. Of the older woman in question, “She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion.”
It was a quick one, he writes, after which “she’d smacked my rump and sent me to grace.” Still, Harry seemed to look back on the episode with regret. “Among the many things about it that were wrong. It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub,” he writes.
Item 3: The Sun went so far as to get a Spanish edition of the book and translate it, all to reveal the time a teenage Harry tried some cocaine. Spoiler: he didn’t much like it. The partying prince did a line at a hunting weekend. Then some more… just to be sure.
“It wasn’t very fun,” he concluded, “and it didn’t make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective.” All he wanted was “to feel. To be different. I was a 17-year-old willing to try almost anything that would alter the pre-established order.”
Item 4: It was well-known speculation when Harry was growing up that it was possible that his actual father was not Prince Charles but his mother Diana’s former lover, Major James Hewitt. The two met at a party thrown by her lady-in-waiting, Hazel West. Harry recalls jokes from then-Prince Charles that he felt were closer to “sadism” about whether or not Charles was the boy’s real dad, reports Page Six.
“Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire,” Harry writes. “He’d always end with a burst of philosophizing … Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?
“He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt. One cause of this rumor was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism.”
In the book, Harry notes that his mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until after he was born.
Item 5: It’s just a bad idea to scroll all the way through your new flame’s Instagram and risk seeing something you’d rather not see. We all know this, but Prince Harry apparently didn’t learn that lesson with Meghan Markle—because he did it with her hit TV series.
The Prince writes that he started “googling and watching” scenes from Markle’s USA Network show, Suits. What he saw was almost too much for him to handle: He “witnessed her and a castmate mauling each other in some sort of office or conference room.” His royal proclivities traumatized, he writes, “it would take electric-shock therapy to get those images out of my head.”
Luckily for Harry, he’s now safe from life as A royaL and ensconced safely with Markle in Montecito—next door to their fairy godmother, Oprah.
Other royals that fled England in crisis also ended up in similar warm climes—Edward VIII and American socialite Wallis Simpson ended up in the Bahamas after he abdicated the throne in 1936 and then had a shameful visit to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler the following year. Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas in 1940, and the pair lived the island life until he left office five years later. They spent the 50s and 60s flying between Europe and the States, living the life of socialite celebrities.
Certainly, life in California is a few steps above the cold, sniping corridors of the Palace, where family member is pitted against family member and arguments between grown men occasionally end in fisticuffs. If Harry never wanted to be invited to Sandringham again, he’s done a jolly good job at ensuring that’s so.
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