Twenty-years later, Prince Harry would face similar embarrassment on a 2012 trip to the Wynn in Las Vegas. According to Harry, after a night of gambling and boozing, his friends invited a group of “dodgy” women to his luxurious suite. They started playing pool, when Harry decided to spice things up.
“I suggested we up the stakes,” he writes in Spare. “How about a game of strip pool? Enthusiastic cheers. Ten minutes later I was the big loser, reduced to my skivvies. Then I lost my skivvies. It was harmless, silly, or so I thought.”
But the next day, cellphone photos of an intoxicated, naked prince were posted on TMZ, ruining his Vegas vacay. When he got back to England, he expected his father to come down hard, but Charles was sympathetic. “He was gentle. Even bemused,” he writes. “He felt for me, he said, he’d been there, though he’d never been naked on a front page. Actually, that was untrue. When I was about eight years old a German newspaper had published naked photos of him, taken with a telephoto lens while he was holidaying in France.”
That same year, the reserved Catherine, Princess of Wales, was appalled when long-lens photos of her sunbathing topless at the pool were taken while she was vacationing at a chateau owned by Princess Margaret’s son Viscount Linley. She and Prince William later sued Closer magazine, and the couple was paid 100,000 euros in damages.
William and Catherine have become experts at covert family trips, often blending in with other families or staying in secluded luxury spots in Mustique, the Isles of Scilly, the ski resort of Courchevel in France, and the Middle Eastern country of Jordan, where the Princess of Wales spent part of her childhood.
Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have been spotted on private vacations in Costa Rica and the Caribbean island of Canouan. As he writes of a 2019 visit to Elton John’s legendary home in Nice, vacations are one of the few times a royal can have (if they’re lucky) true anonymity, and be a tourist just like everybody else.
“We took a scooter ride with David [Furnish], around the local bay, down the coastal road,” he writes in Spare. “I was driving, Meg was on the back, and she threw out her arms and shouted for joy as we zoomed through little towns, smelt people’s dinners from open windows, waved to children playing in their gardens. They all waved back and smiled. They didn’t know us.”