Not a great week for inherited wealth. Cooee, it effs you up. If you don’t end up as some trustafarian tossing about on Instagram recommending aerial yoga, or an heiress pretending you’re a glossy “humanitarian” while living on Daddy’s dime, you’re Prince Harry, on late-night television, describing how your royal “manpiece” got frostbite in the Arctic because you didn’t have a bespoke “cock cushion” - a luxury fleece item - and telling everyone how your family is a bunch of cold, craven, self-obsessed arseholes, without realising you might be one as well.
Why do we give these airless individuals airtime?
Another top-tier nepo baby is, of course, Brooklyn Peltz Beckham. Having tried (and failed at) photography, modelling and football, Victoria’s firstborn is now a chef.
Not, you understand, a chef who can actually cook things. He is so talentless it appears he - someone - has decided it is safer if his speciality is, in fact, not cooking things.
I laughed out loud when, just nine days ago, he showcased what the Daily Mail called his “controversial ‘Michelin-style’ Sunday roast” – basically raw beef.
A self-described “nutter in the kitchen”, who once enlisted a 62-person crew at a cost of dollars 100,000 to film him making a sandwich, Brooklyn needed a whole Michelin-starred chef to help him produce a one-minute video of him not cooking meat. When there were gales of laughter on the internet at the bloody, dripping joint, Victoria snapped, “It’s rare, people, not raw.”
If only everyone could have this PR.
Not being understood and then moaning about it is, of course, the raison d’etre of all nepo children. Get given palaces, cars, gold, ermine thongs - Harry says in his book he was sent one by an American who killed two ermine for the purpose - but the real status symbol now is the luxury of telling everyone that you are unlucky and oppressed.
As Lily Allen put it: it’s actually quite stressful having two creative, well-off, successful parents, you know.
To which I ask: were the children of the rich and famous always this spoilt, or is it new?
I wonder, for example, what Lisa Marie Presley would have made of the present fetish for whingeing. The original nepo baby, Presley, you may have read, died at 54 on Thursday after a cardiac arrest. Her life wasn’t pretty. It was Drew Barrymore meets Prince Harry with a big dollop of crazed, drug-era Miley Cyrus. If there was one person who had something to complain about, it was her. But unlike, say, Harry, she never did.
To summarise: at nine she watched her father die in front of her. She asked the people who were trying to revive him, “What’s wrong with my daddy?”
As a young teen she was sexually abused by her mother’s new husband, who wrote in his autobiography that while swimming in the pool with her he became aroused and began to “crave” her sexually.
“Sick f***,” is what Lisa Marie later said.
After a 72-hour cocaine binge at 17 she was thrown out of the house by her mother, ending up in the arms of Scientology.
She was married four times, including to Michael Jackson, who she insisted “was great with my kids”. I’m not sure it was the dream union she thought it might be.
She said her third husband, Nicolas Cage, wasn’t obsessed with her father – but it ended after 107 days.
Just after she went through a nasty divorce from her fourth husband, her son, Ben, shot himself. I don’t think it’s wrong to conclude that she died of grief.
Would her life have been better if Elvis hadn’t been successful and rich? He might not be dead. She wouldn’t have been born into a stultifying and puzzling world in which everything is sacrificed to meet the needs of the person who is at the top of the tree, whether they’re a bully, a drug addict, an alcoholic or a wet, like Charles, who according to Harry still carried a teddy well beyond childhood.
Most dynasties are like this: The Handmaid’s Tale styled by Tiffany & Co. Male heirs, or sole female heirs, are treated like tiny dauphins - see Harry’s fish fingers served under silver domes. Those who have married into the money are expected to be mute and entirely submissive, like Priscilla, Lisa Marie’s mother, who met Elvis when she was just 14 and had Lisa Marie at 22. She told me in an interview ten years ago that Elvis expected to “talk” while she would “listen”. At 14, she told me, “I had nothing to offer”. Hmmm.
Children are subordinate to the person who controls the money: all childhoods are sacrificed; all members of the family are brainwashed to defer to the source of the power. You will note that even now Harry cannot bring himself to utter a bad word against his father or the late Queen: the people he still fears as the ones in control.
As for those who aren’t, he is happy to let rip – and the targets are always women. Kate is thrown to the bullying wolves; and then there is the “villain” Camilla. Harry has said he is a “feminist”, but look at anything he writes and you will see he persistently slutshames this “Other Woman” while absolving Charles and turning his own wife into some pathetic voiceless saint. This is just how merciless, sneering upper-crust society works.
In a Playboy interview in 2003 Lisa Marie described exactly the same hang-ups as Harry: she “hated attention” and couldn’t bear tabloid “curiosity”. Just as Harry fled America, she fled, strangely, to East Sussex. As someone said to me: “Her life was impossible.”
Harry, the son of a king, may complain all he likes about his own impossible existence, but his tragedies are nothing next to those of the daughter of “the King”.
The Sunday Times
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