Charles Is Royal Hit at Polo--and With Fans

After spending four days among backslapping Texans, Prince Charles of England got to do a little hitting of his own Saturday, scoring two goals in a gentlemanly polo match--in Indio.

He celebrated his team’s 6-4 victory with a brief “walkabout” in the mobbing crowd, offering sweaty royal handshakes and receiving a few kisses before sharing a victory drink with his teammates.

In a 32-hour California sojourn ending his five-day U.S. visit, the Prince of Wales spent part of Saturday morning sunning in swim trunks by the pool on former British Ambassador Walter K. Annenberg’s 309-acre Rancho Mirage estate, Sunnylands.

After Saturday’s match at the Eldorado Polo Club, in which Charles drew gasps when his horse almost threw him, he returned to Sunnylands’ half-acre main house for a fund-raising dinner with 40 couples who donated $25,000 each to one of the prince’s pet projects, Operation Raleigh, an international program that dispatches young people to remote areas of the world for exploration and public service.

Guest names were not released, said Annenberg, who was diplomatically dressed for the Prince of Wales’ visit in red trousers and green jacket, the Welsh colors. A guest list would be “a signal for every philanthropic organization in the country to put a drive on them,” Annenberg said.

The press conference permitted reporters a rare look at Annenberg’s palatial estate, and when one complimented the publishing magnate on the grounds, Annenberg said: “As you get on in years, it becomes relatively easy to assume you’ve earned the right to spoil yourself.”

Charles, looking tanned from an earlier Swiss skiing trip and his pool-side morning, had told reporters he was looking forward to the polo match.

“I need the exercise very badly, and my liver needs it even more after four days in Texas,” he said.

Charles emerged from the fenced desert splendor of Sunnylands for the game, the first time he has played in California. It is something he has wanted to do since Charles--who loathes golf--invented a game of golf-cart polo at the Annenbergs’ private 18-hole golf course during a 1974 stay.

After a few moments of “stick and ball” practice on the sunlit field, Charles, wearing a red No. 4 jersey and playing the fourth position on the four-man British team, galloped off to the cheers of a crowd of 4,000 who had paid $10 or $25 to watch. The normal crowd for polo here is about 400, a Riverside County Sheriff’s deputy said.

“I’ve never seen the game before,” admitted Gabriella Dyakowska, 17, who greeted Charles at the airport Friday night and showed up at the polo field on Saturday with her stepfather and British-born mother.

She had never seen a prince, either, until now, she said. “It’s like Halley’s comet--it only comes around once in a while.”

Charles’ polo manager, Maj. Ronald Ferguson (the father of Sarah Ferguson, the current odds-on favorite to marry Charles’ rambunctious younger brother, Prince Andrew), arrived earlier in the week to “check out” the six polo ponies Charles had to borrow for today’s match. He ended up with steeds borrowed from Michael Butler, producer of the Broadway show “Hair.”

Saturday was not the first time Charles has played for an audience. When he was 8, Charles was swinging a toy polo mallet, and his future subjects first saw him play at Windsor Park in 1965.

The game was a bit different from the fields of Windsor, though. He arrived on a polo weekend that had already been set up to raise money for the Bob Hope Cultural Center in Palm Springs, and organizers happily fit the royal drop-in into the schedule.

Joined Forces

“What could we do?” asked one organizer rhetorically. “We decided to join forces.”

“I wanted to play polo with Charles,” wisecracked Hope, who dined at the Annenbergs’ Saturday night, “but they wouldn’t let me ride a golf cart.”

Polo player-actors Pamela Sue Martin, William Devane and Doug Sheehan are among the stars scheduled to play at a celebrity match today. None of the stars suited up against Charles, however. Instead, they watched from the grandstands like anyone else, admiring the princely form on horseback at speeds up to 30 m.p.h.

So it was a weekend of Hollywood stars and British royalty that gave even the hardiest papparazzi photographers whiplash--where to shoot first?

Royal Sponsorship

The polo weekend was sponsored by Piaget, the watchmakers, Bollinger, a champagne the Royal family endorses by royal warrant, and Michelob, a beer it doesn’t.

With the usual winter visitors and polo fans-for-a-day, area hotels were so crowded that the British press people were dismayed to find themselves put up in a hotel named for a Revolutionary War battle, the Lexington.

Despite the business boom in the Coachella Valley, Indio is still not the ritziest address, and the word Indio rarely crossed the lips of polo organizers, who persisted in saying the match would be held “just beyond Palm Springs.”

Charles wasn’t the only royal around; he was getting competition a mile away, from the queen of Indio’s National Date Festival, one of the big annual economic boosts to Indio, which despite the recent boom still has 20% of its population living below the poverty line.

It was disadvantaged young people Charles had in mind when he helped to create Operation Raleigh, and three Californians selected for the program met with the prince before his polo game. He asked them to send him postcards.

Having Adventures

Victor Lang, 21, already completed his three-month adventure in Bolivia, but Lisa Campbell of San Francisco, 24, still faces her three months in New Guinea, where she will, among other things, search for the Salvador’s Monitor lizard, which grows to 20 feet; grade soil quality, and build first aid posts in isolated villages.

Scott Brooks, 21, of Los Angeles, will be climbing mountains and building an outback police station in Australia.

The project is dear to Charles, and much in keeping with his school years in Scotland and Australia, where he hiked 100 miles on weekends and cut down trees.

“For the most of us with average ability, (Operation Raleigh) helps to bring out talents,” Charles said.

Prince Charles returns to England early today.